


Reciprocal Teaching

by Lissa (spinningrobo)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dyslexia, Idiots in Love, M/M, Modern Era, Self-Indulgent, Tutoring, caspar's dad sucks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-26
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23332480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinningrobo/pseuds/Lissa
Summary: As a tutor, Linhardt's used to being the one doing the teaching. But his newest tutee may end up teaching him a thing or do.
Relationships: Caspar von Bergliez/Linhardt von Hevring
Comments: 27
Kudos: 140





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is incredibly self-indulgent. Huge thanks to cutiepi for helping cheer me on through this.

Tutoring was a way to pay the bills. It wasn’t the most ideal way -- the most ideal way to pay the bills, Linhardt thought, would be to participate in a few hundred sleep studies, especially if they could be completed in nice hotels. But it was _a_ way, and it sure beat a lot of other ways one could pay the bills.

“And then,” Ferdinand said, collapsed back against the cream sofa as if it could somehow devour him whole, “the jerk had the _nerve_ to request _a double shot of espresso_ after I had already completed making his drink! And when I told him so, do you know what he said to me, Linhardt? Do you know?”

“I do not know,” Linhardt said. His bookbag hit the floor with a crash; he probably should take better care of his stuff, but, well, it’s fine. It’s fine. “I am sure you are going to tell me, though.”

“Of course!” Ferdinand said, with a flourish of his hand that suggested that he may have been doing Linhardt a favor. “As I said, this jerk -- the usual jerk, you know the one of whom I speak…”

Linhardt nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you’ve made that clear.”

Ferdinand huffed. “Well, he wished for me to remake his drink, but I told him, he was not precise with his ordering! And he said… oh, I cannot believe what he said to me.” Linhardt could see Ferdinand’s body tremble, as if the thought of the same dark and handsome jerk’s most recent insult was enough to terrify him to his bones. “He said… _next time, you should pay more attention to what is left unsaid._ ” Ferdinand looked up at Linhardt, his golden-brown eyes wide. “Can you _believe_ the nerve?!”

“Mm.” Linhardt started emptying the contents of his bag. Two sets of notebooks. Three or four textbooks. He left the handfuls of pens floating around the bottom unattended. Let them have their freedom. “Doesn’t sound any worse than usual, honestly.”

“It was _the worst_ ,” Ferdinand moaned, slinking down against the sofa until his rear slid to the edge.

Linhardt smiled. “Did he leave you a tip, at least?”

“Oh, yes,” Ferdinand said, his expression suddenly brightening. “Five dollars.”

Linhardt chuckled. Yeah, tutoring had its ups and downs, but at least he was being paid _specifically_ to deal with idiots.

“Oh,” Ferdinand said, sitting up, his doom and gloom coffee-shop romance suddenly forgotten, “I just remembered. The tutoring company called you not so long ago.”

Linhardt groaned. “They know where I am,” he said. “Why do they always call when they know I’m working?”

“Why do you refuse to get a cell phone like the rest of society?”

Linhardt felt his face tighten. “Not worth it,” he said. “Anyway. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll give them a call back.” He yawned. “Eventually.” It was probably something stupid that Linhardt absolutely would not want to (or, to be honest, be able to) deal with, like double-checking a pay stub or inquiring about the improvement in little Bernadetta’s grades. It could wait for later. It could wait forever.

Ferdinand nodded. “They said something about a new student.”

This, however, piqued Linhardt’s interest. He blinked. “Oh,” he said. “Huh.” He took his coat off and left it on his recliner, as if it were a blanket for his collection of books and notebooks. “Thanks. I’ll give them a call.”

A new student could be incredibly helpful. Linhardt had been tutoring with Eagle Education for about a year, and while business was initially very good, recent competition with other tutoring companies had dried up the well of clients. Linhardt was still able to make ends meet, but only with financial support from his parents, and, well…

The sooner they were off his tail, the better.

He dragged himself into the kitchen and picked up the phone. His fingers dialed the number in by muscle memory -- why would anyone need a cell phone if they could use their brains? Sheesh. He listened to it ring once, twice, before a familiar voice called out from the other end of the line.

“Good afternoon! Eagle Education, Dorothea speaking. How may…”

“Dorothea.”

“Oh!” The woman’s voice somehow took an even more chipper tone. Linhardt never understood how she could do that. “Linhardt! Thank you for calling back!”

“If this is about a pay stub, Dorothea, I swear…”

The woman giggled. “Now, Lin, am I the kind of person to trick you into calling?”

Linhardt considered this for a second. “Absolutely,” he said.

Dorothea broke character and _snorted_. “You got me there,” she said, chuckling. “This time, though, I’m not tricking you. A new student was just registered, and we think you’d work well with him.”

Linhardt did not miss the way Dorothea worded this -- _a new student was just registered._ He frowned. “Don’t tell me it’s a kid, Dorothea…”

“Not any more than you are, Lin,” she replied. “No, his father is… well, it seems like a complicated situation. Suffice to say, he could use some Hevring magic.”

Linhardt nodded. So, a boy, probably around his age… so college-aged. With an overbearing father. He can understand that. “All right,” he said. “What subjects?”

“Reading, primarily,” Dorothea said.

“Reading… what?” Linhardt paced through the kitchen. “Law, literature..?”

“Just reading, Lin,” Dorothea said, and there was a certain tone to her voice that he knew was trying to hint at something, but Linhardt hated the entire concept of hints, so he usually chose to ignore it. However, this time…

“Wait,” he said, stopping. “You mean, like, how to read?”

Dorothea sighed. “If you’re going to force me to spell it out for you,” she said, and he could almost hear the frown in her voice. “He has difficulty decoding words. I am sure that’s not beyond your capabilities to teach, though?”

Linhardt hummed. He, theoretically, knew how to teach reading. He knew, at least, the basic components of reading instruction. Or, at least, he knew one theoretical framework for teaching reading, and while it sounded legitimate from a layperson’s perspective, he was not entirely sold on it for reasons he could not elaborate on further than _it is just how I feel._ He let out a breath. Well, whether or not he was qualified, he could at least use this as an opportunity to test a pre-existing theory, and perhaps even revise it, and that sounded a lot more interesting than watching Bernadetta fret over dividing fractions for the tenth week in a row.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it. What’s his name?”

Dorothea was smiling. He could feel it through the phone.

“Caspar,” she said. “Caspar von Bergliez.”

* * *

Caspar von Bergliez, apparently, wanted (or, was forced to want, or was coerced into wanting) to meet the very next day. That worked for Linhardt, who didn’t have nearly as busy a schedule as he liked to pretend he did. (He liked to pretend he had a busy schedule so people would leave him alone. It worked half the time.)

Dorothea had given Linhardt the address to rendezvous with his newest student, but it wasn’t until Linhardt was halfway there that he realized his feet were leading him to Ferdinand’s coffee shop. He felt his shoulders drop. Public lessons were difficult enough as it was -- why couldn’t people just rent use of a room in a library like the gods intended?! -- but coffee shops were notoriously tricky, especially with Ferdinand snooping around.

The sight that greeted him as he entered the coffee shop did not put him at any sort of ease.

“Mister von Hevring?” a booming voice bellowed across the room. Linhardt didn’t have to look to find the source of the voice; it was a man, broad and built, with a mess of pale blue hair on his head and an even thicker mess on his chin. His presence was so overwhelming that Linhardt almost didn’t notice the much smaller man sitting beside him, his eyes fixed on the edge of the table, hands in his lap, foot wagging soundlessly in the air.

Linhardt nodded and headed toward the table. The younger man -- Caspar, Linhardt assumed -- did not even look up. The older man did not seem to mind, instead thrusting his hand out for Linhardt to shake.

“Ernest von Bergliez,” he said. It was more than a simple offer of information; it was a declaration, although of _what_ Linhardt had no idea. His handshake was firm, steady, and Linhardt knew his own was woefully inadequate in return.

“Linhardt von Hevring,” he replied, giving a polite nod of his head.

This was followed by a hollow stretch of silence, broken only by the sound of Caspar yelping as his father elbowed him in the side.

“Manners, boy!”

Caspar lifted his eyes from the table and looked up.

Oh. Linhardt swallowed. Caspar had an extraordinary mop of bright blue hair, and even brighter blue eyes, lined with enviably thick and dark eyelashes. He smiled, and Linhardt felt something in his stomach _quiver._

 _Gods,_ Linhardt thought, _I must be constipated._

Caspar reached one hand out from beneath the table and extended it toward Linhardt. “I’m Caspar,” he said, and, oh _no,_ he had _dimples._ He suddenly wondered whether or not Dorothea was playing a terrible trick on him. Heh. _Well done if so_.

Linhardt’s face, thankfully, did not betray any of his inner turmoil, and he took the offered hand gently. This time, his handshake was equally matched. “My pleasure,” he said.

“Sit,” Ernest von Bergliez said, and, again, it was not an invitation, but rather an order. Before he knew it, Linhardt found himself sitting on the rickety, uneven chair. This would be distracting. He’d have to ask Ferdinand about it later.

Speaking of Ferdinand… he didn’t seem to be around. He probably had told him his schedule at some point, but Linhardt had never had any reason to pay attention until, well. Now.

“My son,” Ernest said, and Linhardt did not miss how Caspar seemed to shrink at the sound, “is _nineteen years old,_ a _sophomore_ in _college_ , yet is still reading at a _sixth grade level_.”

“Dad,” Caspar whispered, “do you have to…”

“What?” His father looked over at Caspar, and Linhardt watched the color run out of the young man’s (cute) cheeks. “Are you _embarrassed?_ Are you _ashamed_ of yourself? Do you not want everyone to know you _can’t read_?”

“Okay,” Linhardt said, “I understand.” It was an attempt at subtly cutting in and, hopefully, ending the conversation. While Caspar’s father did not shout, his voice was loud enough that he did not need to; by this point, even the florist next door would know that there was a barely literate college student somewhere in the vicinity.

Ernest shook his head. “Pathetic,” he said, before looking back at Linhardt. “I was told you’re some kind of miracle worker.”

This surprised Linhardt. He spoke before he realized. “O-oh?”

Ernest snorted. It was not a kind sound. “Oh, indeed.” He leaned across the table; unlike his son, Ernest’s eyes were a dull, lifeless blue. Cold. No, not cold. The absence of temperature all together.

_Tepid._

“Look here,” he said, “I paid for a month's package. Three lessons a week. Four weeks. Twelve lessons.” He sighed. “It wouldn’t be the first time I wasted money on this one, but let’s give it a shot. It’s not like you can do any damage, at any rate.”

Caspar’s eyes flickered toward Linhardt for a second before moving back to the table. It was a small, subtle movement, but Linhardt caught it all the same.

“All right,” he said with a nod, doing everything within his power to keep his voice steady. He had the sinking feeling that he was the prey at the end of the hunter’s rifle, and he did not want to let Mister Ernest von Bergliez see him flinch.

That was seemingly the correct answer, as Ernest stood up a moment later, pushing the chair in with a terrible screech. “I’ll return in an hour,” he said, before turning to look at his son. “Don’t waste his time, you hear?”

“Yes, Father,” Caspar said.

Linhardt busied himself in his backpack as Caspar’s father stormed out of the coffee shop. He… did not have any sort of special plan, especially as first lessons were usually used to, well, get to know the student, their goals, and their abilities. But something about the beast of a man that his student called his father made him feel like he had to hit the ground running, so he pulled out a blank notebook (blue cover, like Caspar’s hair, and college ruled, because Linhardt was not an _animal_ ) and a random pen snatched from a bank.

When the door shut behind Ernest and his shadow disappeared from the view of the windows, Caspar looked up.

“I am _so_ sorry,” he said, and his voice was… a lot higher than Linhardt had expected. A little on the nasally side. Cute. “I _told_ him, he didn’t have to come, but he can’t help himself, he wanted to make sure you were a real person and not, like, I don’t know, some sort of crazy robot teacher or something…” Caspar paused for a second. “You’re not, right?”

This was not a question Linhardt had been expecting. _How do I read these letters together?_ Sure. _What does this word mean?_ Of course. But _are you a robot teacher..?_

“I,” he said, with none of the grace and poise a proper robot teacher would possess. The rest of the sentence didn’t follow. Just “I,” sitting alone in the universe, floating in the space between them, singular and unmodified.

Caspar didn’t seem to notice. He laughed -- another high-pitched sound, straight from his nose, and just as trumpeting as his father’s voice, but far more charming -- and hit the table, shaking his head. “Of course you’re not!” he said. “Robots aren’t _real. "_

“Robots are real,” Linhardt said before he could catch himself. “There are some stores in Japan that only employ robots.”

Caspar’s eyes went wide. “Are you serious?!” He had the distinct look of some sort of nocturnal marsupial, all bug-eyed and incredulous. “Whoa. What do they do during their lunch breaks?!”

Again, Linhardt could not resist. “Their lunch breaks? They’re robots, they don’t need…”

“Ah,” Caspar interrupted, tapping his chin. “Got it. They probably use that time to refuel.”

Linhardt pictured it suddenly -- a line of robots, ranging from hyperrealistic ones with humanoid faces to weird boxy ones from antiquated cartoons, all standing in a cafeteria, guzzling jars of oil. He wanted to smile, but as soon as the image came to him, it was replaced by the shadow of Caspar’s father’s face, peering down at him, the smell of tobacco on his breath and some bits of french fry in his beard, demanding to know what it was his son learned today, and Linhardt did not think _the use of robots in Japanese retail society_ would be an acceptable answer.

“So Caspar,” he said, looking back down at his notebook, “reading doesn’t come easily to you?”

Caspar sighed. It seemed that he, too, had escaped the thrall of the robots. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

Linhardt looked up at him. “Why are you apologizing?”

Caspar had the paper wrapper of a straw wrapped around a finger and was tugging at its end. “Because you gotta deal with me instead of, I don’t know.” He tore his eyes away from the wrapper and peeked up at Linhardt. “It _is_ pathetic, isn’t it?”

Without thinking, Linhardt responded. “I don’t think so,” he said, busying his hand by writing _CASPAR_ down on the top line of the notebook in large, clean block letters. “There could be lots of reasons you didn’t learn how to read when you were younger, but ‘being pathetic’ isn’t one of them.” He skipped a line on the page. “When’s your birthday?”

“July 1st, 2000,” Caspar said. “But you don’t have to get me anything.”

Linhardt snorted. “I’ll remember that,” he said, writing the date down. _A few months older than me,_ he thought. He tried to imagine it -- being his age and struggling to read, with a father who felt about as warm as a sheet of ice. He couldn’t.

“He’s not always like that,” Caspar said. Linhardt startled; he didn’t _think_ he’d said anything out loud. No, he was sure he hadn’t. “My father, I mean. I’m sorry about him.”

“Again,” Linhardt said, “you don’t need to apologize.”

“It’s just,” Caspar continued, spinning his empty ice coffee cup in his hands, “with my brother and all, and everything, he’s just been really busy, and he doesn’t really have time to worry about me, and the school is saying I’ll lose my scholarship if my grades slip, and they’re already slipping, they’ve already slipped, and…”

“Wait,” Linhardt said, putting his pen down. “Scholarship?”

Caspar’s head snapped up. Linhardt suddenly wondered if he’d realized he’d been rambling at all. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s not an academic one, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

It _had_ been what Linhardt was wondering. He smiled. “Athletic then?” Looking him over again, no longer in the shadow of his imposing father, Linhardt could see it; Caspar had a lean physique, and the definition of his biceps were clear even through his t-shirt…

“Nah,” Caspar said, laughing. “Anyway, don’t worry about it. It’s not a huge scholarship, but my family’s been stretched thin lately, and…”

Linhardt nods. “I understand.” He filed the issue of Caspar’s mysterious scholarship away for another day. There were more pressing things to attend to. He pulled his backpack up on his lap and fished through his belongings, looking for _anything_ that might be appropriate. Physics book, no… chemistry, absolutely not… he frowned. He really had come ill prepared for an actual lesson. He could see Caspar at the edge of his peripheral vision, looking at him curiously. _Think, Linhardt, think._

He put his bookbag back on the floor and pushed the notebook across the table. “Here,” he said, handing him his pen, “write a quick paragraph about yourself. Introduce yourself to me.”

Caspar took the pen. His eyes glanced at the paper before glancing back up at Linhardt. “I can just tell you…”

Linhardt shook his head. “Writing,” he said, entirely aware that he was making this all up as he went along, “is very much connected to reading. If you can write something, you can read it, and vice versa. Let me see what you can do on your own. Then we can work from there.”

Bullshit. Utter bullshit. But Caspar seemed to buy it, and his brow furrowed as he looked down at the paper, pen held tensely in his hand. “Sorry,” he said again, before beginning to write.

Linhardt watched with a strange sense of curiosity as Caspar frantically moved his pencil over the paper. Usually, if he were the one writing so quickly, it would be because he had a lot to say and his mind needed his hand to try and keep up. But Caspar was very actively writing very little, his hand more engaging in the show of writing than in actual writing itself. For every five or six ‘strokes’ done, contactless, in the air, his pencil would make a single mark on the page. Often he would sit, hunched over the paper, one hand tangling in his bright blue hair, and Linhardt could hear the sound of him softly sounding out words that ought to have been second nature to him by his age.

What felt like a short eternity later, Caspar peeked up, his blue eyes slowly meeting Linhardt’s. There was an obvious flush to his face.

“Um,” he said, quietly, “is this enough?”

Linhardt slid the notebook back over toward himself and looked at the page. On the plus side, Caspar had extremely neat handwriting. On the less-good side, he used his very neat handwriting to write, well….

_my name is Caspar and i am 19 yeers old i liv with my dad in my big brozer. i am not good at reeding or riting but i am good at carate. well ok i am not good at carate but i am tring to be good at carate so i can be stron. i studdy comunicashon at collig._

Linhardt’s eyes widened as he read Caspar’s introduction. Across from him, Caspar was looking down at the table, flicking the balled up straw wrapper between his index fingers. Something about the sight made Linhardt’s chest clench; he looked back down at the writing, trying to determine some course of action.

“Okay,” he said, quietly, looking back up. He smiled, ignoring how unnatural it felt. It wasn’t for his sake, anyway. “I think we can work with this.”

He immediately regretted his choice of words ( _think_ we can work with _this_ ), but Caspar didn’t seem to notice, looking up at him, wide-eyed, like a puppy who had just realized what the word _walk_ meant.

“Really?” he said. His eyes crossed over Linhardt’s face -- and _oh,_ that did _something_ to Linhardt’s chest (or, perhaps, he thought, it was simply indigestion) -- and hooked onto his smile, which he returned in kind. It looked much more natural on his face than it felt on Linhardt’s. “You think you can help me?”

Linhardt looked back down at the writing. He had to look away, and the writing seemed like a good place to start. “Y-yes,” he said, brow furrowing in thought. “Yes, I think I can.”

Honestly, he was a little frustrated. He was not trained in reading, at least not at this sort of basic level of decoding, and yet he could still see the patterns in Caspar’s text that revealed to him the sort of gaps he had in his knowledge. How had Caspar presumably gone through twelve years of school without a single teacher doing the same for him?

He pointed at the text. “So your command of English is fine. I can tell you are probably using simplified language here because it is easier to spell, yes?”

Caspar nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “and because… I don’t know.”

“It takes you awhile,” Linhardt offered. He saw it with his own eyes, after all. Observations are the heart of scientific research. “The act of spelling the words out is so arduous for you that you can’t keep your mind on a more complex sentence.”

Caspar didn’t say anything. Linhardt grit his teeth; had he been too presumptuous? He always had a bad habit of being presumptuous. But when he looked up, Caspar was blushing.

“I… I don’t think spelling is amorous,” he said, one hand reaching behind himself to scratch at the nape of his neck. “I don’t love it.”

Linhardt let out a loud, unseemly snort, holding back the crack of laughter threatening to spill out from his chest. “Arduous, Caspar, not amorous. It means difficult.”

“Oh!” Caspar somehow went even redder, although he was, thankfully, smiling. “Then why didn’t you say that?!”

Linhardt let out a trickle of the laughter he’d been holding in, shaking his head. “My apologies,” he said. He looked up at him, grinning. “That mea…”

“I _know_ what that means,” Caspar said, rolling his eyes. He was also grinning, though, so he at least had managed to catch Linhardt’s playful tone; that was another thing people sometimes had trouble with when he was involved. “Look, I may be stupid, but I’m not a moron.”

“You’re not stupid.” The words came out of Linhardt’s mouth before he had time to even think them. He blinked, startled by the sound of his own voice, before processing the words he’d spoken out loud and realizing that, yes, they were true. ‘You’re not stupid,” he said again, folding his hands on the table and looking over at Caspar. “I have the distinct impression that most of your teachers were, how can I put it… bad.”

Caspar stared at Linhardt. The flush of his skin clashed terribly with his eyes and hair, but it was still… something. It was still _something._ “I mean,” he said, itching his neck again, “they tried…”

Linhardt shook his head. “They obviously didn’t try that hard,” he said, looking back down at the paper. “Look. You know your letter sounds. This all makes sense phonemically. That means the letters and the sounds match. It’s just spelling patterns you have to learn. Like…” His eyes darted over the lines Caspar wrote again. “This, here. _Yeers._ That makes sense! We often write the long e song with a double e!” He reached into his bag and grabbed one of the pens floating around the bottom, pulling it out and circling the word. “However,” he continued, “in this case, we would use ‘ea’ to make the same sound. Like this.”

Next to _yeers_ he wrote _years._ He looked up at Caspar. “See?”

Caspar looked as if he was in a trance. “Ohhh. Like, my teachers taught me, when two vowels go a-walking, the first one does the talking, right?”

Linhardt groaned. “It’s not always that simple, but yes, for now, we can think of it that way.” _Doesn’t work for words like friend_ or _food_ , he thought, but they could get to that at some point. “Here, try these.” He wrote some more words on the page before looking up at Caspar expectantly.

Caspar bit his lip and looked down. “Y-years,” he said, nose wrinkling. “T… tears? F...ears?”

Linhardt smiled. “There you go. Now, that’s not always the case. Like this..” He wrote down _pears_ and _wears_. “In this case, these words don’t make a long e sound. You eat pears, not peers, right? And…” He thought for a second. “That woman over there,” he said, pointing at a lady at another table. “She wears a dress, not weers, correct? But with time this will become second nature to you.”

Caspar watched him write, his eyes darting with every moment of Linhardt’s fingers. When Linhardt stopped, Caspar looked up at him, mouth gaping open, eyes practically alight.

“You’re amazing!”

Linhardt froze. “What?”

Caspar traced his fingers over the words on the paper, mouthing them to himself silently. _Tears, fears, pears, wears…_ “I get it,” he said finally, looking back up at Linhardt. “It makes sense to me!” He reached over the table and snatched the pen out of Linhardt’s hand, despite having a perfectly good one right next to him, and began to write. 

Linhardt bent over the table to watch.

_He wears pants. She eats pears. He fears pears! He crys tears._

Caspar peeked up, not lifting his head, and grinned, his eyes meeting Linhardt’s. “Right?”

At that moment, Linhardt split into three separate people. One of them bemoaned the spelling _crys,_ wanted to teach him desperately about words with ‘ie’ in them, about how to add the suffix ‘-s’ to verbs ending in ‘y’. Another part felt absolutely thrilled, that deep ache of success, the rush of seeing a student grasp something for the first time. And the third…

Well.

Enough about that.

Linhardt (the body, Linhardt, that held the three Linhardts in tow) mirrored Caspar’s grin.

“Brilliant,” he said.

* * *

By the end of the lesson, Linhardt had taught Caspar a handful of vowel pairs and the sounds they made. They’d gone over basic words whose spelling defied all rhyme or reason, like _are_ and _do_ and, at Caspar’s insistence, _dragon_. (“What does it drag on?”) They practiced reading simple sentences over and over until Caspar’s reading became more fluent, and by the end the boy sitting across the table was no longer sheepishly apologizing for his choppy reading, but rather trying, quite bravely, to tackle new words.

When the time was up -- evidenced by Caspar’s father, broad and terrible (or so Linhardt had decided), standing outside the door like some sort of reverse bouncer, Caspar practically leapt to his feet.

“Are you a hugging person?” he asked.

Of all the questions Linhardt had expected from his new student, this was _not_ one of them. “Pardon?”

Caspar laughed. He scratched at the bridge of his nose with his index finger. “Guess not,” he said. He reached out his hand -- the one he _hadn’t_ just used to itch the dead skin off of his snout -- and smiled. “See you on Thursday?”

Linhardt took his hand. It was shockingly dry, and larger than he expected; his own felt dwarfed in comparison. He tried not to think about that too much. “See you on Thursday,” he replied, shaking his hand.

Then he watched as Caspar disappeared through the door, and from the window he watched him shrink.

* * *

When he got home, Ferdinand was sitting on the couch, a bag of Goldfish crackers in one hand, a can of fancy beer in the other.

“Linhardt,” he said, his voice the exhausted drone of misery, “come, sit with me. Listen to what happened today…”

“You sound like my old grandmother,” Linhardt said, tossing his bag on the ground and walking into the kitchen to grab a can of seltzer. (Peach-flavored.) “Anyway, you weren’t at work today, so I doubt it has to do with Mister Big and Brooding.”

“But it does,” Ferdinand said, before pausing. “Wait, how do you know I was not at work today?”

Linhardt sighed. “New student,” he said, flopping into his armchair and opening the can with a _hiss_. “We met at your shop. You weren’t there. So I surmised.”

Ferdinand frowned. “Was…”

“No,” Linhardt said, taking a slow sip from his can. The bubbles felt good on the way down, but only if you gave them space to breathe. “He wasn’t there.”

Ferdinand laughed. It was a soft, hollow sound. “That was not what I was going to ask,” he said, “as I already knew that.” He gave Linhardt a look, and Linhardt knew that the look was him quietly begging him to take interest in his mysterious story, but Linhardt found it difficult to care.

“Then what?” he asked, sidestepping Ferdinand’s frustratingly redundant love life and returning to the original query. “What were you going to ask?”

In his credit, Ferdinand only looked a _little_ put out. “I was going to ask,” he said, “if everything was all right? You seem quite glum for someone who just had delicious coffee and made some money.”

Huh. Linhardt paused his thoughts to let himself feel his feelings, and he had to admit that Ferdinand might have been right. He _did_ feel glum. “You’re right,” he said. He tried to keep the disappointment from his voice. “I suppose I do feel a bit down. Hm.” He sipped his seltzer, brows furrowed. “Wonder why.”

Ferdinand’s eyes were fixed on him. Linhardt tried to ignore it, but Ferdinand was stubborn, like some sort of idiotic retriever, and he knew he wouldn’t back down until he was satisfied.

Linhardt sighed. “What?”

“What?” Ferdinand replied, blinking. At least those big amber eyes were off of him. “I am simply concerned about y…”

“Tell me,” Linhardt said, turning his body toward Ferdinand and putting his half-finished can of seltzer on the end table. “What happened with whats-his-face?”

“Oh no!” Ferdinand said. “Do not think I will fall for _that,_ Linhardt!”

Linhardt waited two beats.

A stupid smile spread over Ferdinand’s face, and his cheeks pinked. “Well,” he said, “if you _insist…_ ”

And so Linhardt was sucked into Ferdinand’s story, something about a text message, a mistakenly-sent Facebook request, an awkward crawl through his crush’s Instagram, attempting to figure out who each person in his pictures was. Was that his girlfriend? His sister? A sickly cousin? A slideshow of saved tweets. A screenshot of a last.fm.

“Do you see?” Ferdinand was saying, waving his phone in the air. “He was listening to _Rigoletto_ , and that was _after_ I had mentioned to him that I had recently seen a production…”

Vowel sounds. Blends. Consonant clusters. Multisyllabic words, broken into small pieces. Prefixes, suffixes, and reading them on sight. Morphemes. Bright blue eyes and a dazzling smile. The top of the mountain, and the sudden fall. A back, small and withdrawn, disappearing beyond a cafe window.

* * *

That night, after Ferdinand had finally drunk himself to sleep (two beers and a single frozen margarita), Linhardt opened his laptop and created a new tab on his perpetually open incognito window.

He opened Google. He took a deep breath. He typed in Caspar’s name.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caspar learns about the 'ie' digraph, and Linhardt learns absolutely nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I am going to write a shorter chapter," Lissa said, and then they wrote a longer chapter.

* * *

Looking up Caspar von Bergliez on Google was a breach of every code of social and professional integrity that Linhardt knew, but as soon as he hit the enter key, he found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the screen.

First, just like himself, Caspar did not seem to share his name with anybody. There were a handful of Caspar Vanburgens and even a Casper Von Berg but only one consistent Caspar von Bergliez. He did not seem to have a huge online presence, which comforted Linhardt for reasons he couldn’t quite discern (and, to be frank, did not care to discern). Unlike Ferdinand’s secret vampire crush, Caspar did not have an easily traceable social media identity. There was a Twitter account with one single tweet (“Hello!”) and a blurry picture of a boy who was unmistakably Caspar, but many years younger. There was an old MySpace, complete with animated GIFs of skeletons doing hot wheelies over pixel flames, but most of the site had broken with age and disuse, leaving little information for Linhardt to absorb.

There was no Instagram. No Tumblr. No Facebook that he could find.

In fact, one of the only things Linhardt came to learn about Caspar during his brief search online was that Caspar was a liar.

* * *

On Thursday afternoon, Linhardt arrived at the coffee shop first. He chose the same seat they had sat at the previous lesson, as he was a creature of habit and he would now forever associate that seat with Caspar, and all others with Not-Caspar. He was slightly more prepared. He had their notebook, a ziplock bag full of pens, and a few phonics primers he’d printed off the internet. But most of all, he had a mission.

Finally, he saw the familiar shapes of Caspar and his father appear outside the shop. He could see Caspar's father looking down at his son and saying something; Linhardt couldn’t see it, but he imagined spittle flying out of his mouth, getting all over Caspar’s face. Gross. He saw Caspar nod -- once, twice, three times -- before turning around and reaching for the door.

Linhardt felt a surge of hot white relief that Ernest von Bergliez did not enter with his son. He hoped that meant something good -- perhaps he had somehow proven himself to the older man, which meant literally nothing to him on its own, but might provide him with more flexibility with the lessons moving forward. Caspar’s father hadn’t said anything to him yet, but he had the distinct air of someone who would, sooner or later, decide his experience of having been a mediocre student meant he knew as much as a trained educational professional, and hence would determine he had the right and ability to control the curriculum. Never mind that there _was_ no curriculum. Linhardt still bristled at the idea of it (or its lack thereof) being controlled.

Caspar walked into the coffee shop and looked around. He was dressed smartly, in a pair of pressed khaki pants and a plaid button-up shirt. The buttons seemed a tad tight around his chest. Linhardt pointedly did not think about thinking about that.

“Over here,” Linhardt said, lifting his hand a few inches into the air.

Caspar’s eyes snapped to face Linhardt, and his face broke into the brightest grin Linhardt could remember having ever seen. “Oh!” he said, bounding over. “Same place as last time! This must mean these are _our_ seats now!”

Despite having just thought that, Linhardt wrinkled his nose. “Caspar,” he said, “these seats belong to the coffee shop… anybody can use them.”

Caspar blinked at him as he sat down. The sea green of his shirt somehow brought out the blue of his eyes even more, and Linhardt couldn’t help but notice how dark and thick his eyelashes were. Lucky. “Well, yeah,” he said, wiggling a bit as he scooted his chair in. “But we can still claim them as ours.”

Linhardt chuckled. “What if somebody else is sitting here next time, then?”

Caspar balled a fist with one hand and punched it into his other, laughing. “I’ll kick their asses.” He paused for a moment. “Their… deriarres.”

Oh, no. Oh no, no, no, no, no. This was not happening. Linhardt was _laughing_ , and his heart was registering some part of this experience as _enjoyable_ , and for a moment he was on the verge of forgetting how he had planned to feel. And how he had planned to feel was annoyed.

He coughed. Adjusted his collar. Tucked a long lock of hair behind his ear. Straightened himself out.

“So, Caspar,” he said, all business, “I’d like to teach you another vowel blend to me. Look here.”

He opened his -- their -- notebook and pointed at a page. “These two letters,” he said, fingernail scraping over a messily printed ‘ _ie’,_ “often make a long ‘i’ sound, which, as you know, simply states the letter I’s name.’

To his chagrin, Caspar was immediately mesmerized, his eyes (so, so blue, sickeningly blue) following the trail of Linhardt’s fingertip like it was guiding him down the path to treasure. Perhaps it was, in a way.

“Okay,” he said. “I, E… says I.” He looked up at Linhardt, a playful smile on his lips. “So says I.”

Linhardt rolled his eyes. “Try these words.”

Caspar went back to the paper. “P… p… pi… pie! T... tie! D… di… whoa, Linhardt, that’s dark.”

A small breath puffed out of Linhardt’s nose. “Say it.”

Caspar swallowed. “Die,” he said. He looked up at Linhardt again, still with those frustrating eyes. “Please don’t die.”

“We all will someday,” Linhardt replied, chuckling a bit despite himself. “Very good. Now let’s try it in more complex words, where it comes in the middle.”

Caspar frowned, but before Linhardt could even contemplate what _that_ meant, his eyes were off of him (thank the gods) and back on the page. “T… ie...d? Tied? Oh, I see. Like _I tied my shoes._ "

Linhardt couldn’t help himself. “Good job. Can you do that, Caspar?”

“Of course,” Caspar said, looking up with a slightly indignant expression on his face. “You make bunny rabbits.”

“Of course,” Linhardt echoed, chuckling. “Go on.”

Caspar went back to the notebook. “Tr… tried? Yeah, tried! _Linhardt tried to tie his shoes, but they knotted.”_ "

Linhardt groaned. “Caspar.” He chanced a quick glimpse at his shoes. _How did he know?_

Caspar simply grinned, his cheeks dimpling, and went back to the paper.

“Fr… fried. Fried potatoes. Bad for you. Delicious. Flied… wait, isn’t it ‘flew’?”

This was one of those exceedingly simple questions that throws all teachers off balance, and Linhardt’s body jolted, as if he’d stuck his finger in the nearest socket. “Um,” he said. “I’ll get back to you on that.”

Caspar laughed. “Don’t worry about it. You’re probably right.”

 _The plane flew to Toronto… I flew to Toronto…._ “Oh.” Linhardt blinked a few times, trying to clear his head. “Um. Maybe.”

Caspar looked up at him. “I think I got it, teach,” he said. “What’s next? Oh! Can I call you sensei? That’s what I call my teacher in karate class.”

“About that,” Linhardt said, frowning. There it was. The annoyance. “Read this next sentence.” He pointed to a string of words at the bottom of the page, written in his scrawling handwriting.

Caspar’s eyes rested on Linhardt’s frown, and he frowned in return, looking back down at the page. “You… l… lied? You lied to me?” He blinked. “What?”

Linhardt huffed. “In your introduction to me last lesson,” he said, turning the notebook back to the first page, “you said you were not good at karate but were learning.”

“Yeah,” Caspar said. He blinked again. “Wait, is this because I can’t fly like in the Matrix? Because that’s kung-fu.”

“You can’t really fl… never mind.” He shook his head. “What I mean is, you’re a _black belt._ You’re not bad at karate!”

Caspar sat there for a moment that seemed to last a thousand days. He stared at Linhardt, and Linhardt knew he was in it now -- he should have never stuck his nose into Caspar’s business, now Caspar wasn’t going to trust him, he was going to lose him as a student… but then, finally, he laughed.

“What?!” He shook his head. “Linhardt, I’m only 1st _dan._ That’s barely a beginner.” He stretched his arms out over his head; they seemed constrained in the tight, stiff fabric of his dress shirt. Linhardt pretended not to notice. “Wait. How did you find that out, anyway?”

There it was. “I looked you up,” Linhardt said, trying to ignore the hammering of his heart inside his chest. Why did he care so much? He didn’t care. He’d be thrilled if Bernadetta stopped taking his lessons. He didn’t care about this at all! Still, he’d practiced a white lie, so he tried his best to use it. “I look up all my students, to, uh, make sure they aren’t with our competitors.”

“Oh,” Caspar said. “Well, that makes sense. Does that kind of thing happen?”

“It does,” Linhardt said. He knew he didn’t care about this, so why did Caspar’s innocent acceptance of his answer make him feel so relieved? “I did a whole week of lessons with this one student -- very tough, aggressive, argumentative student -- just to discover he was working for another company and was scoping us out.”

“Oh, wow,” Caspar said. “Was he cute?”

Now it was Linhardt’s turn to blink. “Pardon?!”

Caspar looked confused. Then, a moment later, his face shifted, and his cheeks went bright red. “I mean, like, was he a cute kid, or something? I mean, why would you put up with that kind of attitude in a student if he wasn’t, you know?”

Ah. Well, that made sense… some kind of sense, at least, which is more than Linhardt’s head was making. After spending so much time around other people like himself, it was sometimes hard to remember that the rest of the world didn’t necessarily follow suit.

But wait…

“Caspar,” he says, hardly able to keep the incredulousness out of his voice, “do you _really_ think a rival company would send a _child agent_ in to spy on us?”

There was a brief pause. Then Caspar shrugged.

“Iunno,” he said. He was laughing. “I would! Nobody would suspect a thing.”

Linhardt opened his mouth to protest, and then shut it. Mm. He _did_ have a point.

“Anyway,” Linhardt said, pointing his finger back at the sentence, in the book, the book that was supposed to be the focus of this, which was supposed to be a _lesson,_ “why didn’t you tell me you were a black belt?” He looked back up at him. “That’s _incredible,_ Caspar.”

There it was. That red hot hue that Caspar had worn most of the previous lesson, stumbling over simple words, struggling with syllables. But this time, at least, he was grinning. He was grinning at the _table,_ granted, but that was better than nothing.

“It’s really not that impressive,” he said. “Like I said, I’m only 1st _dan._ " He looked up; something in Linhardt’s eyes must have given away his confusion, as Caspar leapt into an explanation.

“So in karate,” he said, “there’s different levels, yeah? You start as _mukyu,_ or a white belt, and you work your way up the ranks!” He slid the notebook closer to him and grabbed a pen from Linhardt’s ziplock bag, drawing a series of rectangles all over his paper. “So you’ve probably seen, like, people with blue belts and purple belts, all that, right? But that’s usually just international karate schools, and there’s no set pattern for them… some put yellow after white, some blue, I’ve even seen green!” He laughed, as if Linhardt would have any idea why this was so funny; Linhardt touched his ponytail for no particular reason. “But,” Caspar continued, “once you get to a black belt, it kinda… resets? And you’re back at level 1, but you’re _shodan_ instead of _mukyu,_ and we count the levels in _dan_ rather than _kyu,_ which…” He stopped suddenly, putting down the pen and looking at his hands. “Uh. Sorry.’

“No,” Linhardt said. He hadn’t realized he was leaning over the table. Oh well. “I’m listening. What’s the difference between a Q and a dan?”

Caspar peeked back up at him. His lips twitched back up into a smile.

“A _kyu,_ " he said, “is like a… degree? A grade? It’s for young students, or, you know, students still learning the basics.”

 _Like you were,_ Linhardt thought. The image was bright and clear in his mind: a Facebook page for a local karate school, and a picture of Caspar, arms draped over the shoulders of two other, far less interesting people, grinning ear to ear with a black belt around his waist. ‘Congratulations,’ the caption had said, ‘to our newest black belts.’ It hadn’t been that long ago.

Linhardt didn’t say any of this. He simply nodded. “I see. And a dan is…”

“A _dan,”_ " Caspar said, correcting Linhardt’s long ‘a’ into something shorter, “is like… a step. The belt stays the same, but the ‘step’ you are on changes. I’m at the first step.” He smiled and itched the bridge of his nose. “I’ve still got a long way to go, with both karate and, well…” He looked down at the notebook. “You know.”

Ah, right. Yes. The reason they were both actually there. “Apologies,” Linhardt said. The toes of his boots shuffled against the floor, making a loud squeaking noise. He _really_ needed to talk to Ferdinand about the upkeep of this place. He didn’t know what a squeaky floor would have to do with his general grievances about his roommate’s place of employment, but he also did not care. It vexed him either way. “I can get carried away.”

“Me too!” Caspar laughed. “My father always says…”

His words trailed off, but it was okay. Linhardt could hear the rest of the sentence in his own head, clear as day, although it wasn’t Caspar’s father saying it.

“Mm,” he said, nodding. “Mine too.”

* * *

In an effort to make up for having gone so terribly off-topic, and to make Mister von Bergliez’s money worth something, Linhardt doubled-down on reading for the rest of the session. He quizzed Caspar on what they had studied the time before, and helped him make flashcards with sight words on them.

“The secret,” Linhardt said, “is to write the word, and then an example sentence beneath it, so you can see the word in a context that you created.”

“Okay,” Caspar replied. His lips puckered as he looked at the list. “So this next word is…"

“Sound it out, Caspar.”

He nodded. His lips moved, silently in the air. “W--a-- long a, right… oh! Wait!”

“Brilliant. Now let’s come up with a sentence together.”

Caspar’s pen scratched across the index card, scrawling out a beautiful w, a, i and t. “Hmm…” He scratched his forehead, seemingly deep in thought before his eyes widened. “Oh, I know! Let me try.”

“Try on the notebook, first. I didn’t bring enough index cards to waste them.”

“Okay,” Caspar said. “But no looking.”

Linhardt tilted his head to the side. “But then how can I check…”

“Don’t worry about it!” Caspar grabbed the notebook and began to write something, flipping back to previous pages to, presumably, check the spelling of other words. He held the opened pages aloft, blocking Linhardt’s line of sight. A moment later he lifted his pen and looked down at his sentence.

“Are you done?” Linhardt said.

Caspar nodded. “Yeah!” he said. “It looks good. I’mma copy it.”

Linhardt opened his mouth to protest, but then closed it Oh, whatever. Let Caspar feel like he is in charge of this part of his learning. If he misspelled the rest of the sentence terribly, they could just fix it later. Let the boy have a bit of privacy.

He watched Caspar as he pulled his index card back in front of him and began to write, in his small, extraordinarily neat handwriting, the sentence he had just penned. He was hiding it with his hand, but Linhardt was no longer interested in that particular mystery. He was caught in thought, thinking about, well… how embarrassing it must be for him, having to come to a fairly busy coffee shop and learn basic reading strategies from someone his own age. (A bit younger, even -- not that Linhardt had been thinking about that, or anything.) There was an admirable amount of _vulnerability_ in the whole exchange, as Caspar was laying all of his struggles at Linhardt’s metaphorical feet, bare and plain to see. Linhardt, who refused to emerge from his bathroom until each stray hair on his brows was plucked and eradicated, couldn’t imagine being so, well… open, about one’s faults.

So let him write his own sentence. He could afford Caspar that degree of artificial dignity, at least.

“Okay,” Caspar said, a moment later. He closed the notebook. “What word is next?”

“Decide,” Linhardt replied, looking down at his list. “See here? Remember what we talked about, with the letter ‘c’ sometimes making an ‘s’ sound.”

“Decide,” Caspar repeated. “Okay. Yeah. Help me write this one.” He put the end of the pen in his mouth, chewing on the cap. Gross. “How about this? _I decide to skip class._ "

Linhardt looked up at him. “Don’t you dare,” he said. He opened to a blank page in their book and began to write. “I’ll hunt you down.”

Linhardt couldn’t see Caspar’s face. But he could hear him shuffle in his seat, and he could hear the now-familiar sound of his nails scratching at his face, dislodging loose bits of dry skin that would become dust on the table. (And then, Linhardt thought, would hopefully be wiped up by a Lysol wipe and thrown in the trash, never to be seen again, but with the general state of the shop, he couldn’t be so sure.)

“I wouldn’t,” Caspar said, a second later. “Not yours. Don’t worry.”

By the end of the lesson, they had studied twenty new sight words, a handful of vowel blends, and had started r-controlled words. _Water. Later. Fur. Burn._ Linhardt had a page full of his own notes. He was beginning to tell Caspar what their next lesson would be about -- Greek and Latin roots, but _no, Caspar, not like the ancient gods, and no, Caspar, not like Disney’s Hercules_ \-- when the figure of Ernest von Bergliez appeared at the door.

And then opened the door. And then came in.

“Linhardt von Hevring,” he said. There was an unspoken demand in his voice, but Linhardt couldn’t parse it. He merely stood.

“Mister von Bergliez,” he replied, nodding his head. “Good to see you.”

It was a lie. He felt compelled to keep his eyes _off_ of Caspar, to not let them stray anywhere _near_ Caspar in his father’s presence, but even without looking at him he could tell that he was shrinking. The energy at the table had dissipated the moment his father had spoken, and Linhardt felt a sudden pang of insecurity without it. Still. He kept his eyes on Caspar’s father, feigning his best impression of courtesy.

“How was my son today?” Ernest asked. “Is he giving you any trouble?”

 _Such a strange question to ask,_ Linhardt thought, _about a grown man._

“Not at all,” he said with a shake of his head. He smiled. “He’s a fantastic student.”

Ernest snorted. He did not sound convinced. “Is that so.” Maybe this was what happened to all of Caspar’s previous teachers. Perhaps, in the face of Father von Bergliez’s stony ire, they had given up on Caspar. Perhaps they had been intimidated away from helping him. Perhaps complete failure was an easier rock to hide behind than incomplete success.

Linhardt felt… something. He felt something, and he would examine that feeling later -- or, more likely, he would never examine that feeling, and chalk it up to a chemical reaction happening in his body, to the surge of hormones that are produced when under stress, or to, perhaps, the sentimental song playing overhead, some nameless piece of acoustic drivel that some unremarkable white girl sang. Either way, there was no time for _feeling things_ in the moment. There was only time for responding.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached over and grasped Caspar’s shoulder, softly squeezing it. “He’s extremely receptive. And a very fast learner.”

A few things happened at once. Caspar’s shoulder stiffened under Linhardt’s touch. Linhardt, again, felt _something,_ and, again, put said _something_ in his imaginary bag of who-gives-a-shit. Ernest von Bergliez’s eyes moved from Linhardt to Caspar and then to the hand connecting Linhardt’s hand to Caspar’s shoulder. He shook his head and snarled.

“I’m telling you,” he said, looking back up at Linhardt with an expression that Linhardt could only parse as _glaring,_ “if you are _wasting_ my money, I swear to God…”

“Dad,” Caspar said suddenly. “Stop.”

Linhardt suddenly could not breathe.

In his memory, the room went silent. In reality, the room didn’t change at all; people on first dates continued to make small talk, groups of teenagers continued to shout at each other, a lady on a laptop continued to look up at everyone with complete irritation, having been distracted, yet again, from her work. In reality, the only silence was felt at the little table Linhardt and Caspar were at, and the silence did not last nearly as long as it would in Linhardt’s recollection.

“You,” Caspar’s father said, and while he wasn’t looking at Caspar, the edge in his voice made it clear that he was speaking to him, “get your things and meet me outside. We’ll have a discussion when we get home.” He turned his attention back to Linhardt. The look on his face was unreadable, but it sent a shiver down his spine either way.

“Saturday, noon,” he said. “Goodbye.”

Linhardt watched as Ernest von Bergliez turned and headed for the door. It was like watching a soldier march, tall and proud and consumed with haughty pride. He waited until the door was slammed shut behind him before looking down at Caspar.

“I am so sorry,” he said.

Caspar was scrambling to get his things together. Somehow, over the course of an hour, they had managed to completely cover the table with pens and sticky notes and index cards. Linhardt wished he had brought a rubber band.

“It’s not your fault,” Caspar said, shoving the cards he and Linhardt had made into his backpack’s front pocket. “I’m the one who should apologize. I got him mad.”

“You didn’t,” Linhardt said. “He was already mad when he came in.” There were so many things Linhardt _wanted_ to ask, for reasons he _didn’t_ want to know: was he always mad? Why is he so angry? What is he like at home? _Are you safe?_ But he had already stepped far out of the bounds of professional relationships, and he had to preserve whatever boundaries there were left. So he settled for a soft chuckle and a shake of his head. “I don’t think he likes me very much.”

Caspar zipped his backpack up and gave it a quick shake. He tossed it over his shoulder and stood up. “Yeah,” he said, pushing his chair in. He looked up at Linhardt and smiled. “It’s because I like you. Sorry.”

Linhardt was not going to think about that.

“Well,” he said, extending his hand for an end-of-lesson handshake, “I’d much rather have your approval than his, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Caspar blinked. “Oh?”

Um. Had he said something wrong..? Linhardt quickly replayed the last few seconds of their conversation in his mind. Oh. Yeah. He could understand Caspar’s reaction. He reached for a way to fix it. “Of course,” he said, “you’re my student, after all.”

Caspar laughed and took Linhardt’s hand. His handshake was soft, gentle. His skin was still so dry. “Yeah, but he’s the one paying you.”

Linhardt shook his head. “I don’t really care about that.” He laughed. “Go before you get in more trouble. I’ll see you on Saturday.”

Caspar nodded. He wore yet another expression that Linhardt couldn’t translate; this had always been a weakness of his, but he was finding it _particularly_ vexing now. But Caspar’s lips, at least, were turned in a soft smile.

“Saturday,” he said, before turning around and rushing for the door.

* * *

Ferdinand wasn’t home when Linhardt returned. There were, at least, some small blessings in the world. He put his bag down on the floor and took off his shoes. Without the sound of Ferdinand’s chronic melodrama, the apartment was eerily quiet. It was times like these that Linhardt wished their lease allowed for pets.

He threw his coat on his recliner on the way to the bathroom. He turned on the water -- hot, but not scalding -- and pumped soap onto his hands. _Seaside Rendezvous._ Whatever _that_ meant. He lathered his hands up and looked in the mirror. In the back of his mind, the chorus of _Jolene_ played.

He looked tired. Had he always looked this tired? He was nineteen, which was still, technically, a teen, although also, technically, an adult. A liminal space in the flow of time, or, at least, how it was measured by society. It didn’t matter. He still looked exhausted, his eyelids drooping, dark bags underneath his eyes. His hair looked equally put out; the crown of his head appeared greasy to his eyes, whereas his ends, held neatly by a black hair tie, were dry and brittle. It didn’t matter. He didn’t know why he felt so put off by it.

He turned the water off and opened his medicine cabinet. He grabbed a cotton ball and his makeup remover. He wet the cotton ball with it and dabbed it over his eyes. He didn’t wear foundation. His skin, at least, was something he could live with as is. But he felt oddly vulnerable without his eyeliner, without a coat of mascara. He looked tired enough _with_ their help. He couldn’t imagine leaving the house _without_ it.

He wasn’t thinking about the startling blue eyes of a fresh-faced boy, vibrant and alive, framed by thick, dark eyelashes. He wasn’t thinking about how they seemed to shine when he looked up at him, sending a jolt of energy through his body stronger than any shot of espresso. He wasn’t thinking of a smile that seemed to light up the room, and augh, how _cliche_ is that, anyway. He wasn’t thinking about dimples, or jawlines, or mussed-up hair that still looked somehow in place. He wasn’t thinking about dry, cracked hands, or how they might move through a piece of wood. He wasn’t even sure that was karate, anyway. But he still wouldn’t care, because he was _not_ thinking about it.

He washed his face and dabbed it dry with a soft towel. He would moisturize later. He wandered into the living room and collapsed onto his recliner. He thought about making something to eat, but he was already sitting, and hence he had missed his chance.

He might have spent the rest of the day like that, simply existing in his chair, if Ferdinand hadn’t come home.

“Linhardt!” cried Ferdinand’s voice from the foyer. Linhardt could hear the sound of plastic bags rustling and sighed; Ferdinand _still_ wasn’t using the reusable ones. “Are you home, Linhardt?!”

“I am home, Ferdinand,” he said. He let out a yawn. “Did you go shopping?”

“I did indeed!” Ferdinand entered the room, an assortment of plastic bags dangling off of his arms. Linhardt straightened up a bit to see; unfortunately, the bags seemed to be full of clothing, for Ferdinand, and not chocolate, for the both of them. He sat back down. “Do you wish to know why?”

 _Not particularly._ “I’m on the edge of my seat, Ferdinand.”

Ferdinand sat down on the couch, arranging the bags neatly beside him. Linhardt peered again -- yup, clothes, makeup, shoes, but no chocolate. Damn. Ferdinand smiled and slid his overcoat off of his arms. Linhardt noticed that he was practically bouncing on the couch cushion.

“I,” he said, “Ferdinand von Aegir, have a _date._ ”

Huh. After weeks of listening to Ferdinand’s romantic redundancy, _this_ was almost interesting. Linhardt perked up. “Oh, really?”

Ferdinand preened. “Yes, really!” He pulled one of the bags over toward his lap and began to dig through its contents. “Hubert -- oh, that’s his name, by the way, isn’t that just _dreamy?_ \-- finally asked me to be his companion to the movies tomorrow.”

Linhardt was absolutely positive that there was no name _less_ dreamy than Hubert, but that wasn’t a conversation he really wanted to get into at that moment with Ferdinand. Anyway, it’s not like he was one to talk. _Linhardt. Augh._ “That’s great,” he said, and it surprised him to realize that he meant it. It really _was_ great. “What are you going to see?”

Ferdinand beamed. “Oh, a _classic_ Broadway musical is coming to the silver screen, and we absolutely can _not_ miss an opportunity to watch it!”

Linhardt blinked. Oh dear. “Ferdinand,” he said, “you’re not going to watch _Cats_ , are you?”

“Why yes, we are!” Ferdinand said. He looked positively giddy with the thought. Linhardt decided to not say anything.

“Wow,” Linhardt said. “I hope you have fun.”

Ferdinand grinned, holding a tacky floral blouse to his chest. It was hideous, but somehow he made it work. “Thank you.” He replaced the floral blouse with some paisley monstrosity. Again, it worked. “So… how was your lesson today, Linhardt?”

“I…” Linhardt paused. There was something about Ferdinand’s voice that he did not like. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, just curious,” Ferdinand replied. He seemed to have settled on the paisley thing, as he had set it aside and was now considering between two mustard yellow pairs of pants. “My coworker said there was an incident with an older gentleman.”

“Oh.” Linhardt groaned. He should have expected that Ferdinand’s coworkers would tell him everything. Not that there was anything to _see,_ but… “Yeah. His father is a piece of work. But I wouldn’t call it an _incident,_ per se.”

Ferdinand nodded. Linhardt had the distinct impression that he was no longer interested in this story, and, frankly, Linhardt wasn’t either. Well. He was. But he wasn’t interested in telling it to Ferdinand.

Ferdinand, for his part, was now holding up two pairs of identical socks, scrutinizing them closely. “My coworker also told me,” he said, the nonchalant innocence in his voice obviously feigned, “that the two of you seemed to be having _quite_ a good time.”

Ah. There it was.

“He’s my student, Ferdinand,” Linhardt said. He let himself sink back in his recliner. Ferdinand could look at his ugly clothes on his own.

“True,” Ferdinand said. “But it is not as if you are his professor or school teacher.”

Linhardt groaned. “What makes you think I’m even interested?” He reached his hand out for something, anything, and landed on the tissue box. He threw it in Ferdinand’s general direction. Good enough. “I’m not some thirsty idiot.”

“Oh, I know,” Ferdinand said. He sounded unphased; Linhardt peeked and saw, to his great disappointment, that the tissue box had barely made it halfway to the couch. He was getting _weak._ “But would it be so terrible if you were? My coworker seemed to think you two had _quite_ the chemistry…”

“I’m going to my room,” Linhardt said. It took a lot to get him to leave the comfort of his recliner, but Ferdinand had somehow discovered the secret. He gathered his coat in his arms. “Let me know if you make dinner.”

He heard Ferdinand chuckle. “Of course.”

Linhardt tossed his coat on his desk chair and flopped down on his bed. To call it a ‘desk’ was to make quite a grandiose claim about its purpose. It had the shape of a desk, sure, and had probably been meant to function _as_ a desk, yes, but it was now little more than a glorified catch-all area. Unopened bills sat under piles of half-read books. A collection of seltzer water cans, many half-finished and long-dead, stood toward the back and side. Artifacts of hobbies, once thrown into with gusto only to be forgotten about soon after were sprinkled throughout the mess. A Lego figurine here. A half-knit scarf there. A geode, cracked open, rested atop a Dungeon Master’s guide. Even the chair had become part of the collection, his coat perched on top of a pile of books and magazines.

He reached under his bed and retrieved his laptop.

_My coworker seemed to think you two had quite the chemistry…_

Disgusting. What did Ferdinand’s coworker know, anyway? He opened his laptop and woke it from sleep. Gods, how he wanted sleep. Maybe sleep was the answer to all this. To all what? He was feeling confused. There were no problems that needed any answers, no issues that needed resolving. Well, except for Spotify, which had apparently encountered an error and needed to be closed. But he, himself, was fine.

He opened his web browser and began his usual laps. Nothing was happening on Reddit. The only notification on his Facebook was the friend request he had been ignoring for weeks; why couldn’t his mother understand that it wasn’t normal to be your sons’ Facebook friend? He went to Amazon and checked the status of his most recent order. It had left the warehouse and was on its way to an undisclosed location. Finally, he checked his work e-mail.

A twenty percent off coupon from the home goods store. Another issue of an e-mail magazine he hadn’t read in years. A handful of e-mails from Dorothea, each correcting a typo in a previous e-mail, the chain so thoroughly diluted that its origin was lost forever. And then…

An email from “CvB” with the subject line “SORRY!”

He blinked. He hadn’t given Caspar his e-mail address, but he couldn’t think of any other CvB it could possibly be. Constance was a vN, not a vB. Did he even know any other vB names? Linhardt had a strict ‘no work e-mails in the bedroom’ rule, but his curiosity was eating him up, and there was _no_ way he was going back to the living room to read it. Ferdinand would somehow manage to make it worse. He clicked on the e-mail and waited for it to load.

> Subject: SORRY!
> 
> From: CvB [thecaspman@au.edu]
> 
> To: Linhardt von Hevring [linhardtvh@eagletutoring.com]
> 
> Linhardt hi its Caspar sry to email you i fond this email on the web site under contact so i hope its okay anyway i wanted to appologize for my father he was in a bad mood (see i spelled that rite!! with out spell check!! double o says oooooooooo) but he shuldnt of taken it out on you anyway i hope ur not too mad and i hope to see you agen on saturday
> 
> ps dont look at my sen tens!!!!!

Linhardt read the e-mail once. Twice. He wasn’t sure how Caspar managed to spell so many words wrong despite having a spellchecker… but he was also thrilled to see how many words he spelled _right._ Under! Anyway! Wanted! Out! All spelled correctly, and apparently all on his own! He was so distracted by his joy that he almost missed the last part.

_dont look at my sen tens!!!!_

What was he… oh. Linhardt remembered. Caspar must have been referencing the sentence he’d written for _wait,_ the one he had refused to let Linhardt see. Oh, if only he hadn’t mentioned it, Linhardt would have almost certainly forgotten about it, and he would have never been tempted to look at his ‘sen tens.’

But now, well, he had to.

He rolled off his bed with a groan. He immediately regretted it -- bed was his favorite place, the best place, the _only_ place. But his bag was in the foyer, and his notebook (their notebook) was in the bag, and he could smell something cooking which meant that Ferdinand was going to feed him, so he couldn’t let himself get too comfortable at any rate. The last thing he wanted to do was nap through dinner.

He trudged through the living room and to the foyer. The air smelled of tomato, of basil, of olive oil and cheese. Ferdinand was cooking his famous pasta. He must have felt guilty about earlier. Linhardt looked at him as he passed by the kitchen on his way back to his room, and Ferdinand gave him a quiet smile. He looked so sincere, so pathetic, that Linhardt had to give him a smile back. Everything was okay. He didn’t have the heart to stay annoyed. Not even when, a moment later, Ferdinand began belting his renedtion of _Memory._ Well. At least he was preparing himself for the film.

Once back in his room, he sat back down on his bed and opened his bag. Its contents were quite jumbled, having been thrown in there in a rush, but it was easy to find the notebook. He opened it up and flipped through the pages, looking for any sign of Caspar’s beautiful handwriting in any configuration he had not yet seen.

There were rote sentences about _ways to play in May_ and _dogs and hogs in logs._ There were impromptu spelling tests, complete with Caspar’s frustrated lines through misspelled words and triumphant exclamation points upon success. There was a short story they had written together, taking turns writing lines, about a ninja who worked at a pizza shop. Linhardt had almost given up hope when he finally spotted something new.

It was clearly Caspar’s handwriting, as it was much neater than his own, and it was upside-down. The letters were tiny, each one a little secret onto itself. For a second, Linhardt considered respecting Caspar’s privacy. Then, just as quickly, he decided that ship had already sailed. He pulled the notebook to his face and turned it upside-down to read.

> _wait_
> 
> _I can not wait to see my techer linheart agen._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @spinningrobo on Twitter, #spitefulcleric1591 on Discord


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caspar: I am dropping hints that I like men.
> 
> Caspar: I like men.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not mean to write a slow burn but apparently that is what we are doing.

On Friday afternoons, Linhardt had his weekly sessions with Bernadetta. Bernadetta was a college student, like himself, but she was (very poorly) homeschooled for most of her life, and hence was in a bunch of remedial classes. Therefore, it was Linhardt’s job to help guide her through things an average high schooler would be fairly comfortable with as a rule -- decimal points, fractions, common denominators. It wasn’t fun, and it most definitely was not _interesting,_ but Bernadetta was a docile student, and their hour together generally went without incident.

“Okay,” Linhardt said, pointing at a problem in Bernadetta’s huge, outdated textbook, “try this one. If we assume that Teresa divides all of her seashells evenly between herself and her classmates, _and_ if we assume that each classmate receives an equal number of the large and the small seashells, how many of each variety would each student receive in all?”

“I don’t know!” Bernadetta squeaked. Every utterance that came out of her mouth was a squeak, really. The girl had no other decibel. “Maybe… three?!”

Linhardt arched an eyebrow. “Three _what_?”

“Three… oh, I don’t know! I’m sorry!”

It was odd, Linhardt thought, the difference between Bernadetta and Caspar. Caspar was equally behind -- if not significantly more so -- but yet seemed far less intimidated by that fact. No… intimidation wasn’t the right word. Caspar, Linhardt thought, possessed a strong belief that he _could_ succeed, perhaps due to his success in karate. Bernadetta, on the other hand…

“Bernadetta,” Linhardt said, standing up. “Get out from beneath the desk.”

“I’m sorry,” she squeaked again, curling in on herself. “I’m a failure, a no-good…”

“You’re only a failure,” Linhardt said, cutting in, “if you give up. Now come back here and let’s work on this problem.”

Bernadetta let out a small noise that sounded suspiciously like a whimpering cat, and crawled out from the desk she’d been hiding beneath. “You’re mean,” she said, flopping down on her chair, heavy and sullen. “Caspar says you’re nice to _him_.”

Linhardt nearly dropped his pencil. “Caspar?”

Bernadetta looked up at him. “You know,” she said, “blue hair, big arms, enormous voice?”

“Of course I know who you’re talking about,” Linhardt huffed. As if he’d forget any of his students. Well, his current ones, at least. “I was surprised that you knew him.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. Now that the topic wasn’t solving multistep problems using division, she seemed much happier. “I was the one who recommended your agency to him. He’s in one of my classes.”

_Huh._ Linhardt suddenly felt a tinge of heat rise to his cheeks; he hadn’t expected Bernadetta, of all people, to give someone his recommendation. “Oh,” he said, smartly. “Um. Well. That’s very nice of you.”

“Yeah,” she said, crossing her arms, “it _is._ But now he’s telling me you guys have a lot of fun and you joke around and he _still_ learns a lot, and here you are acting so _mean_ to me.” She looked up at him and pouted, or, at least, tried to pout. It looked ridiculous. He couldn’t imagine that look being effective on _anyone_. Still…

“Huh,” he said, reaching over to her scrap paper and beginning to sketch out the problem -- seashells, classmates, and the protagonist Teresa. “I wonder why that is.”

“I -- hey, what?!”

Linhardt gave her a smile and slid the sheet back over. “Try it now. And remember that you have to show your work.”

As Bernadetta took the sheet of paper back and began to sulk in its direction, Linhardt thought about what she’d said. _Was_ he nicer to Caspar? Oh, he was, absolutely. There wasn’t a question in his mind about that. But why..? He surmised that, on the surface, it was because Caspar inspired more kindness out of him than poor little Bernadetta did. But why was that..?

There was an obvious, entirely unsatisfying answer; while he’d had a few girlfriends in his time, he greatly preferred men, and, well, Caspar, unlike Bernadetta, _was_ a man. But he hadn’t been so nice to other male students; he’d been _kind_ to Raphael, but not particularly _warm,_ and Ignatz hadn’t even returned after the second lesson, despite having prepaid for a set of ten. Without a doubt, none of his other students would ever write a _sen tens_ like _I can not wait to see my techer Linheart agen_ , and not only because all of his other students could spell.

No, it had to be something beyond his gender. What that could be, however, Linhardt had no clue.

* * *

Something Linhardt had been dreading became reality on Saturday; his lesson overlapped with Ferdinand’s shift.

Perhaps, he thought, it would be okay. Ferdinand had been utterly preoccupied with his date the previous night, waxing poetic about how cold his new beau’s hand had been in his, on how stony and serious his face (no, wait, his _countenance_ ) had looked when at the movies, how sincerely he seemed to consider the difficult choice the characters in the film had to make, about which “Jellicle” cat would be crowned winner of the “Jellicle” ball and allowed to ascend to the “heaviside layer.” Ferdinand was positively smitten, and had spent the entire morning waltzing around the living room by himself, cradling an invisible locust-man in his arms. Perhaps, Linhardt thought, he would be too deep into his own mind to even care about the happenings outside it.

Besides, Linhardt thought, it was fine. It was fine. He was a professional, and Caspar was his student, and he was merely going to teach him a lesson about Greek and Latin root words. There was nothing for him to be nervous about, or _shy_ about, and there was absolutely _nothing_ for him to hide.

Still, the threat of Ferdinand’s presence made Linhardt feel especially self-conscious, and he spent an extra half hour getting ready in the morning. It was Ferdinand’s fault that he curled his ponytail. It was Ferdinand’s fault that he ironed his shirt. And it was absolutely, entirely, one-hundred percent Ferdinand’s fault that he applied just the slightest hint of lip gloss, because he couldn’t allow himself to be seen as anything less than a refined, put-together professional in front of Ferdinand von Aegir.

(Never mind that they lived together. Never mind that Ferdinand had seen Linhardt, many, many times, wearing nothing but a ratty old pair of sweatpants and a chocolate-milk stained Nickelodeon Doug t-shirt. Never mind that Ferdinand did not, as a rule, care about what Linhardt looked like, and that Linhardt did not, as a rule, care about what Ferdinand thought. This was different. The context was important. And it was, without a doubt, all Ferdinand’s fault.)

* * *

This time, finally, Linhardt was prepared for a proper lesson. He had brought decodable readers to practice and assess Caspar’s retention of phonics rules and decoding skills. He had brought an entire pack of index cards, newly bought at the store, and a plastic bag full of rubber bands and the occasional stray hair tie. He had brought pens and pencils and even a bundle of highlighters. He had brought their notebook.

He had found their seat occupied by a rather large and intimidating looking person, someone with unironic tattoos of guns and doves, and had instead decided to sit at a table in the furthest corner of the shop, out of the staff’s direct line of sight. The word _intimate_ came to mind and he rejected it immediately, because that was utterly unrelated. There was nothing _intimate_ about the seats. There was nothing _intimate_ about a lesson. If the table happened to be small and the chairs happened to be close together, there was nothing he could do about it. He was a victim of happenstance, nothing more and nothing less.

Their lesson was scheduled for noon. He knew Ferdinand had started work at six -- _how_ he managed to wake up so early, Linhardt would _never_ understand -- and that he would be leaving at two. This meant that he would be there for the entirety of Linhardt and Caspar’s lesson, _but_ he would have to remain there after the lesson ended, sparing Linhardt the awkwardness of having to walk home with Ferdinand. Tiny blessings.

It was 11:57 when Caspar burst through the door of the coffee shop. He immediately looked at their usual seat, his eyes growing wide at, presumably, the sight of the large, macho man sitting in Linhardt’s usual spot. He looked around in a matter that struck Linhardt as _frantic_ . It was… almost amusing, watching a grown man flail about so obviously, and for such a silly reason. Nobody, Linhardt thought, should _ever_ have that sort of reaction to _not_ seeing him. But Linhardt took pity on him and raised his arm overhead. “Caspar!”

Caspar’s eyes flickered in Linhardt’s direction, and his face visibly relaxed. Strange. He shot Linhardt a thumbs up -- even _stranger_ \-- and then, in the strangest development of the afternoon, walked _not_ toward Linhardt but, instead, toward the counter.

Okay, okay. Perhaps it wasn’t so strange -- they both should, of course, purchase some sort of beverage to leverage their usage of the facility -- but Caspar hadn’t the last time, and hence that was now a set pattern in Linhardt’s brain. Still, there was nothing inherently wrong with Caspar getting a drink, except for the fact that his barista was Ferdinand and Linhardt could _see_ Caspar vaguely nodding his head in Linhardt’s direction, and he could _see_ Ferdinand straining up to look. Augh. There went any and all attempts at discretion.

Linhardt sunk back down in his seat and grimaced at the notebook. He couldn’t feel irritated with Caspar (he _did_ , but he knew it was irrational) because there was no way for Caspar to know he knew the weird ginger barista, and that he wanted to keep his private life _absolutely_ private from said barista. Did his lessons even constitute his private life? Linhardt didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about anything at all.

A few minutes later -- 12:02, by Linhardt’s watch -- Caspar walked toward the table. He had two drinks in his hands.

“Here,” he said, setting down a styrofoam cup in front of Linhardt. “The guy at the register said you liked hot chocolate.”

Linhardt looked at the cup as if it were some sort of strange alien relic. He lifted his eyes up to look at Caspar. “Uh.”

Caspar grinned, sitting down across from him. He seemed utterly unaware of any sense of social weirdness. _Must be nice,_ Linhardt thought. “I got coffee for myself,” he said, stretching out his legs. “Believe it or not, it helps with my ADHD.”

There were suddenly two things competing for Linhardt’s interest. The first was the casual disclosure of a previously unmentioned learning disability. The second was the fact that Caspar’s legs, stretched out beneath the table, were touching _his,_ and that, combined with the smell of hot chocolate (with just the right amount of cream and sugar, as Ferdinand knew Linhardt’s perfect ratio), was making him feel _some_ sort of way.

He grasped to the former topic as if for dear life.

“I didn’t know you had ADHD,” he said. He took the cup and lifted it toward his mouth, blowing softly through the slit in the lid. He liked hot chocolate, but he preferred it _warm_. “I do too.”

Linhardt looked up to see Caspar staring at him -- or, more specifically, his mouth. That was a _little_ unsettling. Then Caspar shook his head a bit, a bit of color rushing to his face. _That_ was even more unsettling.

“O-oh?” he said, his hands grasping at his coffee cup. “I-- you don’t seem…”

_Oh, of course._ Linhardt felt a wave of relief ( _not_ disappointment, _relief_ ) and smiled. He’d just been surprised by what Linhardt had said. Well, good. They were even now. “You say that because you’ve only seen me in this context,” he said, pausing to blow more air into his hot chocolate. “If you knew me in real life, you’d understand.”

Caspar hummed softly, looking back down at his coffee cup. This was strange. This was all weird, and Linhardt couldn't tell why. Maybe it was the change of seating. He never handled changes well. He much preferred a bland consistency. Something predictable, safe. Perhaps, he thought, Caspar was the same way.

“Apologies about the seat,” he said, attempting to lighten the mood with a soft chuckle. “While _you_ could probably take that guy, there was _no_ way I was going to even try.”

Caspar lit up at this, lifting his eyes from the cup and looking at Linhardt. A grin spread across his face. “It’s okay!” he said. “I do admit, I was a bit confused when I came in. Thought, wow, how did Linhardt bulk up so much in a day?”

Linhardt snorted. “Oh, please,” he said, glancing over at the man in their rightful seat and then back at Caspar. “As if I’d ever shave my head.”

“Don’t,” Caspar said. “Your hair is nice.”

It was then that Linhardt’s brain decided to helpfully remind him that they were there for a lesson.

“Um,” he said, suddenly preoccupied with the contents of his backpack. “Thank you. So. Greek and Latin roots.”

Caspar laughed. “I looked it up, Linhardt, and according to my family tree, my roots are Germanic all the way down.”

Linhardt looked at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me right now.”

“Well,” Caspar said, scratching his elbow, “with a name like _Caspar von Bergliez,_ what do you expect? You’re German too, right? I mean, no offense, but it doesn’t get much more Germanic than _Linhardt von Hevring_ .” He paused. “Well, I guess it could, if your name was _Wolfgang_ or something…”

“That’s my father,” Linhardt said, laughing. Oh, this was so stupid. “And yes, as far as I know, my _ancestral roots_ are Germanic. But what we’re talking about today is…”

“I know,” Caspar said. He grinned. “Word roots, yeah? I looked it up online.”

Linhardt blinked. “O-oh?”

Caspar nodded. “Yeah. Made no sense. Glad you’re here to explain it.”

This made Linhardt feel good. He hated that it made him feel good. Still, he smiled. “Yeah?” he said, opening up their notebook to a blank page. “So the whole thing about your family was…”

“A bad joke,” Caspar said. He laughed, nails moving from his elbow to, instead, scratch at his nose. “Also, I was curious. About, you know. You.”

Linhardt felt his arms begin to tingle. “Wh..?”

“You know!” Caspar cut in, laughing even louder than before. “Because of the whole, uh, shared heritage thing!”

Linhardt closed his mouth. Ah. Yes. That.

“Anyway!” Caspar leaned over the table, his eyes glued to the notebook. “Gimme some roots!”

Linhardt shook his head. His lips had twitched up into a smile despite himself. “You’re ridiculous,” he groaned, but there was no heat in it. He grabbed a pen and began to write. “Look here, please.”

Caspar planted his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands. Linhardt was writing _auto_ on the paper, trying hard to not notice how defined even Caspar’s forearms were. He had no idea forearms could be defined. That somehow didn’t seem fair.

“This is auto,” he said, risking a glance up. If Caspar’s forearms were dangerous, the sight of his face, framed by his hands, looking at those four letters as if they held the secret to the universe, was downright lethal. He tried to make himself focus on the spot between his eyes. That, at least, was neutral. “Can you think of any words that have ‘auto’ in them?”

Caspar’s eyes looked up and to the side, and his jaw tightened. He was a cartoon character, Linhardt decided. Some ridiculous cartoon character come to life. “Automatic?” he said, hesitantly. His eyes flickered back to Linhardt.

Linhardt nodded in confirmation. “Yes,” he said, “good. Anything else?”

Together, the two of them compiled a respectable list of words using ‘auto.’ Caspar surprised Linhardt by suggesting ‘autonomy,’ and Linhardt felt guilty for being surprised, because no, it wasn’t that Caspar was dumb, or any less bright than anyone else. He had a strong vocabulary. He had good thoughts. He picked things up extremely quickly; having unlocked the connection between the letters ‘auto’ and the idea of ‘self,’ he quickly flew through ‘bio,’ ‘aqua’ and ‘gen.’ (“I am going to invent a time machine and go back in time and _throttle_ whoever decided the letter ‘g’ could be a ‘JUH’ sound.”)

“Multi,” Linhardt said.

“Multimedia,” Caspar replied. “Multi... ply! Multimedia!”

“You said ‘multimedia’ twice.” Linhardt smiled. “What’s the pill you take every morning to keep you healthy?”

“Adderall.”

Linhardt groaned. “The _other_ one. It has lots of nutrients…”

“Oh!” Caspar lit up. “A vitamin! A…” He peeked at the page again. “Multivitamin!”

“Brilliant.” Linhardt couldn’t help but smile. “And what’s the difference between the vitamin D supplement I take every day and a multivitamin?”

“The multivitamin has more,” Caspar said, without a moment’s hesitation. “Like, it would have vitamin D, and vitamin A, and B, and C, and E, and F, and…”

“I am very assured of your competence in the alphabet, Caspar,” Linhardt said. Still, he wondered. Was there a vitamin F? “So what do you think multi means, then?”

Caspar scratched his chin. “More? Or… no…. I mean, that works with multiply, but not multimedia…” He looked at Linhardt. “Many?”

“Bingo.” He grinned. “Technically, it can mean anything more than one. So a multimillionaire might only have two million dollars, but they are still a multimillionaire.”

“Poor soul,” Caspar said, shaking his head. “I’ll pour one out for him tonight.”

Linhardt rolled his eyes. “Anyway, moving on…”

“Wait.” Caspar’s brows were furrowed, and he had a look of intense concentration in his eyes. “So multi means more than one?”

“Yes.” Linhardt wondered if perhaps he should have kept it at ‘many’. Too late now.

“Hm.” Caspar’s hand wandered from his chin to his head. Linhardt wondered if his scalp was as dry as the rest of his skin seemed to be. “Are there… other…. roots that mean the same thing?”

Oh. That was a good question. “Yes,” Linhardt said, a surge of pride billowing in his chest. “For example, a word with more than one syllable may be called either _multisyllabic_ or _polysyllabic…_ ”

“Aha!” Caspar clasped his hands together, seemingly pleased by this complete lack of explanation. “That makes sense!”

Linhardt arched his brows. “Do tell.” If anything, he wanted to see just how internalized this concept has become, so he could know where to move next with their lessons.

Caspar, however, went a bit pink. “Oh,” he said, a sheepish smile crossing his features. _Dimples._ “I have a… friend. He’s, uh, well, you probably don’t know it, but…”

Linhardt snorted. “Is this another karate thing? Because if it is, you’re right.”

“No!” Caspar shook his head. He was laughing, but it was strained. “Uh, he’s polyamorous? And I was just thinking, oh, shouldn’t it be _multiamorous_ instead..?”

For the second time that hour, Linhardt’s self split into two.

One Linhardt was processing the fact that Caspar had friends who were polyamorous, which, while not explicitly, you know, _you know,_ was still, erm, counterculture in some way.

The other Linhardt was thinking about the word _multiamorous._

That Linhardt took over.

“You know,” he said, “you’re right. ‘Amor’ is a Latin root, and so is ‘multi,’ so it would make more sense for it to be _multiamorous…_ ”

Caspar beamed. Linhardt imagined he was proud of being smarter than the fools who came up with these words centuries ago. “And ‘amor’ means love, right?”

Linhardt nodded. There was nothing weird happening in his chest. Nothing at all. “Right,” he said. “Like _amorous,_ or _paramour_ …”

“What’s a paramour?” Caspar asked.

Linhardt pursed his lips. “It’s like…” He thought about it; how was the best way to say this? “It’s like… a secret lover, or something.”

Caspar seemed to take that in. “Ah. Like, a lover you shouldn’t have? Like a mistress?”

“Kind of.” Linhardt frowned. His mind was suddenly going blank, and the only examples he could think of were highly inappropriate ones involving prostitutes or religious figures, and, well, no. “It can be any illicit relationship. Like… oh. Like a boss and their employee.” There. He did it. He found a safe example.

Caspar nodded. He was itching the bridge of his nose again. Linhardt had discovered that meant he was thinking. “Ahh. Or a teacher and a student.”

Linhardt would remember dying at that moment, his heart stopping, his vision going black, and a gentle voice softly coaxing him toward some invisible light. That was how he experienced the seconds after those words -- _a teacher and a student_ \-- left Caspar’s lips. However, it seemed he did not die, and instead managed a good, hearty smile and nod, and even a “well done, good example,” before moving onto a different root, and testing him on the ones they’d covered thus far.

By the end of the lesson, Caspar had perfected the art of identifying common Greek and Latin roots in words, and hence being able to read them with greater ease and fluency. Linhardt had given him a book to read -- something simple, yet not cloyingly so, with a transparent red strip of plastic to help him keep his place. He’d read about that online. Caspar still struggled a great deal, especially with words that had sounds that didn’t match their spellings, but it was such a drastic change from the beginning of the week that Linhardt could have cried. He didn’t, though. He was not that kind of person. There was no sentimentality to be found anywhere within his soul.

His watch vibrated, which was his cue that there were five minutes left of the lesson. He closed the notebook and looked over at Caspar. “Let’s wrap up for today. Did you have any questions?”

In the previous two lessons, Linhardt had learned that this was a somewhat dangerous inquiry; the first time, Caspar had gone on to ask him about how birds manage to lay multiple eggs when their bodies are so small, and the second time he’d baited Linhardt into a debate about the merits of flying over invisibility as a superpower. This time, however, Caspar didn’t leap into a random topic. He simply nodded, quietly, and pulled something out of his bookbag.

He put the item on the table. It was a small notebook, about the size of a paperback novel, with what looked like forty or fifty pages. It had an entirely nondescript orange cover, and a plain saddle-stitched binding. Linhardt looked from it up to Caspar’s face; he was smiling, but it was an uncharacteristically shy smile, almost unnervingly quiet.

“Um,” Caspar said, his eyes darting up to Linhardt’s before darting back down to the notebook, “I was thinking. Maybe we could, you know. Augh. Sorry! It sounds a lot stupider now than it did when I was thinking it!”

Linhardt didn’t know, so he simply blinked. “What is it, Caspar?”

Capsar sighed. “So, like, what if… and you can totally say no! But like, what if… you know, to help me practice my writing and reading… we wrote each other notes in this book? Like, I wrote one already, and you could reply, and then next time you’d give it back to me, and then I’d reply… oh, but wait, no, sorry, fuck, I didn’t think this through! You don’t want to have more work to do on your time off, shit, sorry, never mi…”

“Caspar.” Linhardt reached across the table and placed his hand on the notebook. “That’s… actually an excellent idea.”

Caspar swallowed, looking back up at him. “Wait, wha--?”

Linhardt smiled. “It really is,” he said. Before Caspar could change his mind, he slid the notebook over to himself and tucked it into his backpack. “It’s true, it will help both your reading and your writing, and…” He shrugged. “It sounds fun.”

Caspar stared at him for a moment. Overhead, the radio was playing some cover of an old 90’s pop song, originally sung by a completely forgettable woman, now sung by an equally forgettable man. It wasn’t Natalie Imbruglia’s _Torn_ , but it was something like that, and at any other time it would have irritated Linhardt to no end to be unable to place his finger on the name. But before he could indulge in irritation, Caspar smiled -- a real, genuine Caspar smile, one that felt like the facial equivalent of an exclamation point -- and Linhardt no longer cared one bit about the banal background noise of this utterly unremarkable cafe.

“You really don’t mind?” Caspar said. He was bouncing in his seat a little bit. Linhardt could feel, under the table, the air vibrating around his foot as it shook. Linhardt remembered something.

“Caspar,” he said, completely ignoring Caspar’s previous question, “your ADHD -- it makes it hard for you to sit still, doesn’t it?”

Caspar’s face fell. Linhardt felt, suddenly, the weight of his foot landing on the ground beside his, the ball of his sneakers digging into the tiled floor. “Sorry,” he said. “I… I try to behave…”

“Oh,” Linhardt said. The peak of eloquence. “Caspar, that’s not what I meant.” He sighed and shook his head, trying to place a smile on his face that would look -- hopefully -- fondly amused. “First of all, this is _your_ lesson. You don’t have to worry about _behaving_ here.” (Linhardt was successful at blocking out his mind’s next, immediate thought; he really needed to work on _this_ particular issue. That wasn’t an issue. Not at all.) “Second of all, I don’t care if you move around or not. I was just wondering if maybe it might be better for you if we met somewhere different next time. Somewhere you could move.” _Somewhere my roommate doesn’t work._

Caspar looked up again. He seemed to be processing what Linhardt had just said, as his face flashed through a variety of emotions -- shame, confusion, wonder, curiosity, amusement, and then, finally, something that Linhardt read as relief.

“Oh,” he said, somehow far more eloquent than Linhardt had managed to make the word sound. “Huh. Maybe? I’ll think about it. Can I get back to you on that?” He reached into his bag and pulled out what Linhardt suspected to be his phone, enveloped in some huge, rugged, plastic case, the kind that one might see being thrown out of an airplane in some TV infomercial, an overly excited man shouting about how THERE’S NO DAMAGE! as it lands on the ground. “Can I text you if I think of something?”

Now it was Linhardt’s turn to feel a little embarrassed. “Um,” he said, “I don’t…”

“Oh, shit,” Caspar said, shaking his head. “Sorry, forgot, that’s probably against the…”

“It’s not,” Linhardt jumped in. “Trust me, everyone asks. I just… I don’t have a cell phone.”

Caspar gaped. The look on his face suggested that Linhardt had said something truly outrageous, like that he was married to his grandmother or that he was born with five hands. “What?! Why?!”

“I…” Linhardt had tons of reasons for not having a cell phone; he was afraid he would never be productive again if he had nonstop access to quick dopamine fixes and Wikipedia, for starters. He didn’t like the idea of people being able to get in touch with him at a moment’s notice. He _really_ didn’t like the idea of his mother being able to _text_ him. But looking up at Caspar, with his wide, bright blue eyes, and his mouth, so expressive, rounded into the most absurd looking circle, he suddenly forgot all his reasons. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just never was my thing.”

“That’s fair,” Caspar said, sliding his phone back into his bag. “I couldn’t survive without mine, though. It keeps me organized. Vibrates whenever it’s time to take my meds or go to class or stop playing Cookie Clicker.”

Linhardt groaned. “Do _not_ remind me of Cookie Clicker,” he said. “I barely made it out of there with my life.”

Caspar opened his mouth to say something, his eyebrows reaching up toward his hairline, but Linhardt’s watch beeped, which meant the lesson was officially over. Caspar closed his mouth and began to shoulder his bag. “Thank you, Linhardt!” he said. “Tuesday, right?”

Linhardt nodded. “Tuesday,” he said. The window was harder to see from his seat, but he could still make out a bright splash of blue against it, a surefire sign of Ernest von Bergliez’s presence. “And Caspar?”

Caspar stood up and pushed his chair in. “Yeah?”

Linhardt smiled. “You can email me. If you think of any place you’d rather go. And…” He patted his bag. “I’ll reply.”

A grin crossed over Caspar’s face and he nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “See you soon.”

Linhardt nodded, one eye still fixed on the hint of blue beyond the front window.

“You too. Take care.”

* * *

When Linhardt got home, he did not immediately throw his bag on the floor and slump in his recliner. First of all, it was still early in the day, and while he would have loved nothing more than to wash his face and throw on pajamas, he had a sneaking suspicion he would be forced outside yet again at some point before the night. Secondly, he had a list of things in his mind that he needed to write down as quickly as possible, before they disappeared deep into the recesses of his mind, sandwiched between trivia about the Care Bears and memories of Crystal Pepsi. Third, he wanted to have some time to himself in his room before Ferdinand returned home and demanded his attention. So he headed to his room, backpack still hanging over his shoulder, and closed his door behind him,

Okay. He needed to find something to write a list on. He once had a white board somewhere for that purpose, but it had disappeared long ago and he never remembered to look for it until it was too late. It probably still had a list of things on it from three years ago, and he probably still hadn’t finished half of those things, whatever they were. He tore through the top of his desk, books flying everywhere, looking for… a post-it note, maybe, or a piece of paper, or even a CVS receipt. Something to write on. Near the bottom of a stack of books he found a planner for the previous year, and he opened to the “Notes” pages in the back. Good enough.

He sat down on his bed with the planner and grabbed a pen out of his backpack, realizing a moment too late that he had an entire package of index cards in there that would have easily sufficed. Oh well. He tore the cap off with his teeth and began to write.

**TO DO:**

  1. Reply to Caspar’s message.
  2. Check work email.
  3. Look into cell phones.
  4. Poison Ferdinand.



He smiled. Always better to aim for the stars, as his 9th grade English teacher’s favorite poster said. Something about the moon. Or perhaps it was the moon you were supposed to aim for? He had no idea. He didn’t particularly care.

Satisfied, he tossed the planner and the pen down on his bed and threw the cap out -- he’d been chewing it, he’d belatedly realized, and it had become warped beyond all recognition. _Should add ‘check face to make sure ink’s not all over my mouth to the list,’_ he thought, but his tongue didn’t taste of ink, so he decided to make the brave choice and assume he was fine.

His eyes glanced at the clock. He had about twenty-five minutes before Ferdinand would be home, which, sadly, would have not proven enough time to conjure up the perfect poison. But it was enough time to read Caspar’s message before he became distracted by his roommate’s saccharine nonsense, so he pulled his backpack to his lap, fishing his hand inside to find the thin orange notebook.

A corner of its cover was already bent. Linhardt could hear his mother admonishing him -- _you never take good enough care of your things, Linhardt --_ and frowned, trying to smooth it out. But things that were creased tended to stay that way, and the cover was no exception, stubbornly jutting out at its new angle, refusing to lie flat.

He sighed. _Sorry, Caspar._ With much greater care, he opened to the first page.

The date was neatly written in the corner. Caspar was, apparently, the type of person to write dashes through his sevens and his zeros. He had then skipped two lines before beginning to write in his clear, nearly-perfect handwriting.

> _Dear Linheart,_
> 
> _If you are redding this that meens you excepted my offer of riting notes to each other. Thank you!!!!! I am going to try my best but as you know I am not good at riting so pleese be payshent with me!!!_
> 
> _What do you like to do when you are not werking? I imajin you must like to reed. May be one day I will also like to reed. And it will be be caus of you!! Imajin that! Some times I lissen to awdeo books if that cownts. I lissened to all of Harry Potter wile exersizing last yeer. What house are you? I bet you are a Rayven claw. I tend to like Rayven claws. My exbf was a Rayven claw!!! But not me!!! I’m a Griffindoor thru and thru!_
> 
> _Do you go to collig too? Youve gotta rite?! What do you study?! I bet you have a 4 BILLYON gpa._
> 
> _Thank you for redding this!!! See you soon!!!_
> 
> _Yours,_
> 
> _Caspar_

He read it once. Then he read it again, more slowly. Then he read it a third time, having corrected all of the spelling in his mind, and he could almost hear it in Caspar’s voice; of course, his writing was far clunkier than his speaking, and he lacked any of the sophistication in thought that Caspar had revealed in their lessons. But the energy was there, and…

_My exbf was a Rayven claw!!!_

...Linhardt suddenly had no idea what he was doing.

It was a blessing when he heard the front door open and the telltale sounds of Ferdinand’s shoes shuffling quickly across the floor. Before Ferdinand could speak -- and he could hear, even from his own room, the intake of breath that preceded the inevitable shout -- Linhardt jumped to his feet and threw open his door, beating him to the punch.

“Ferdinand!” he said, a slight edge of laughter in his voice. "I'm in danger!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @spinningrobo on Twitter, #spitefulcleric1591 on Discord


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Linhardt gets ants in his pants.

_ “Ferdinand, I’m in trouble.” _

The minutes that passed after Linhardt said that were irredeemably intense. First, Ferdinand dropped his bags on the floor, which wouldn’t normally be a big deal, except that he had, for some unknown reason, decided that it was the perfect day to bring home a liter of cold brew coffee in a large, innately fragile glass bottle. Then his face went all pale, and Linhardt had to suddenly grapple with the idea that his roommate might actually faint, although whether it was because of what he said or because of the iced coffee now spreading its way across the linoleum was something Linhardt could not discern. Linhardt stepped forward, hesitantly, the way one does when you know you might need to help somebody but you really are hoping not to -- an offer, if one  _ must _ \-- and froze, his hand stretched out in midair, waiting for his next cue. Thankfully, Ferdinand came to soon after, fussing with his soaked bag and shouting at Linhardt to bring him some paper towels.

“In the commercials,” Linhardt mused, watching the white surface of each towel turn brown as the liquid spread across them, “they only need to use one paper towel.” He tore off another sheet and handed it to Ferdinand. “It’s false advertising.”

“ _Linhardt, _ ” Ferdinand huffed, crouching on the ground, looking up at him with his stupid amber eyes, “what on Earth did you mean?!”

Linhardt blinked. “Well,” he said, frowning, “you always see a child spill a glass of milk, right, and then the mother -- or, sometimes, I suppose, the bumbling father -- uses one sheet to wipe up the whole mess…”

“Not about that,” Ferdinand said, and Linhardt was caught off guard by the audible  _ groan _ in his voice, “but about being in trouble.”

Oh. Linhardt felt his face flush a bit, and he bit his lip as he noticed a shard of glass next to Ferdinand’s hand. “Careful, now,” he said, gingerly taking his wrist and lifting it off the ground, trying not to wince as the wet paper towel Ferdinand was grasping dripped all over his leg, “we should sweep this up, first.”

Ferdinand’s eyes went wide, and his gaze followed Linhardt’s until he appeared to recognize what Linhardt meant. “Oh, yes,” he said, nodding. “Let us.”

As far as ways to break the tension went, it wasn’t the worst. Linhardt had experienced worse.

He found himself sitting on the couch a few minutes later, a can of hard seltzer cupped between his hands. Ferdinand had claimed his -- okay, fine,  _ their  _ \-- recliner and was peering at Linhardt with such a look of sincere concern and worry that Linhardt almost felt guilty. Just almost. Just a little bit.

“What is going on?” Ferdinand asked. “Are you… ill?”

Linhardt startled. “What? No.”

Ferdinand nodded. He had an unopened can of his favorite cheap beer in his hands, and he kept spinning it around, like some sort of boozy merry-go-round. “Then are you in legal trouble? Hubert  _ is _ a lawyer, just so you…”

Linhardt shook his head. “No,” he said, and he couldn’t resist the urge to chuckle. “Honestly, Ferdinand, me? In legal trouble?”

“You do shoplift.”

Linhardt groaned. “That was  _ once _ ,” he said. “Anyway. There was no reason such an old, archaic text had to be  _ that _ expensive. The shopkeeper was running a racket.”

Ferdinand sighed. Linhardt knew he wouldn’t keep pressing the topic. It was one that the two of them had a silent understanding that they would simply agree to disagree about. That understanding may have taken a week of very loud, obnoxious arguments to land upon, but it was established, and, anyway, Linhardt knew he himself was correct.

“Then what is it?” Ferdinand asked. “What is the trouble you are in?”

Linhardt froze. He’d gotten so carried away in the nonsense of their usual domestic squabbles -- spilling drinks on the floor, arguing about ethics, never answering questions -- that he’d nearly forgotten what the initial issue was. But Ferdinand just  _ had _ to remind him that he’d proclaimed to be in some sort of trouble, and now Linhardt was being  _ forced _ to reconcile with said feeling, and…

“How was work today?” he asked.

Ferdinand’s eyes narrowed. Linhardt felt a pang of panic; usually changing the topic to Ferdinand’s life, in any sort of way, was enough to get him off of his trail (even when, as his mind quietly reminded him, he was the one who put him on said trail in the first place). Ferdinand, however, did not seem like he was going to take the very easy and very attractive bait. Instead, he frowned -- the effect comical on his big puppydog face -- and opened his beer with a  _ crack  _ and a  _ hiss. _

“It was fine,” he said. Then -- far scarier than his previous look of irritation -- he smiled. “We had the most darling guest today.”

It was then, halfway into a can of hard seltzer, that Linhardt realized he’d fucked up.

“Oh,” he said. He took another sip of his drink. Raspberry lime, but he could only taste the raspberry. “So, tell me more about your date yest…”

“Linhardt,” Ferdinand said. “Why are you being so evasive?”

“Because that’s who I am?” Linhardt shrugged. “Anyway, I…”

“You like him, do you not?”

Linhardt stopped drinking mid-sip.

Ferdinand was looking at him, his eyes fixed on his face, his body angled toward Linhardt’s, in the way a therapist might arrange their own limbs to appear open, friendly, and interested. Linhardt hated it. He hated the weird feeling creeping through his chest, the mixture of anxiety and nervousness that made every sip of his drink burn like fire, that made every piece of food in his stomach churn into lava. He hated how Ferdinand’s gaze wouldn’t budge, how he looked  _ genuinely interested _ , how he didn’t even have the air of his typical gossip-mongering persona, the one that Linhardt found so easy to reject. He hated that he knew Ferdinand would not take his silence as an answer, nor would he accept a refusal.

He hated having to even think about this.

“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered, looking down at his seltzer can. Five percent alcohol. That was nothing. “He’s my student.”

Ferdinand chuckled. “Linhardt,” he said, in that frustrating  _ I-know-we-both-know-this  _ voice, the voice he always used when Linhardt had been shoving things into the overflowing trash can and pretending not to notice it was past full, “you are both adults, and you are not  _ grading _ him on anything. It is vastly different from a typical student and teacher relationship.”

“It’s not though,” Linhardt said.

“Why not?”

“Because,” Linhardt said, groaning, “he’s  _ paying  _ me for something. It’s…” He pulled his legs up and folded them beside him, frowning. “It’s weird.”

Ferdinand let out the most regal snort a man could ever release.

“Linhardt,” he said, shaking his head, his red hair bouncing elegantly across his shoulders like he was in a shampoo commercial, “what sort of complications could possibly arise from such an arrangement? You perhaps giving him higher quality lessons?” He laughed. “That hardly sounds like grounds for punishment.”

Linhardt sighed. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s different than… say, dating your customer.”

“Why?” Ferdinand asked. “My customer is still paying me for something, is he not?”

Augh. Linhardt hated Ferdinand. He needed to kill him. He needed to poison him in his sleep, or throw him off an airplane. He needed to, at the bare minimum, kick him out. “It’s  _ different, _ ” he moaned. “It’s just different.”

If Ferdinand was aware of Linhardt’s ire, he showed no sign. He smiled, radiant like the sun, a classic simile for a classic asshole. “Is it truly different,” he asked, “or are you simply attempting to come up with an excuse?”

“You’re not helping,” Linhardt said. He took another sip from his drink and put it down on the coffee table, pulling a throw pillow onto his lap instead. “You’re supposed to be helping.”

“Why is this not helpful?”

“Because,” Linhardt said, and his mind suddenly lost traction, his thoughts -- once nice and organized, lined up in a row, the way he used to line up his toy trucks on the carpet as a child -- scattering all over the place, besieged by the winds of mildly alcoholic seltzer and a generally frail constitution. “Because,” he said again, heat rising in his cheeks and in his voice, “you’re supposed to tell me I’m right!”

Ferdinand frowned.

“If that is what you want,” he said, furrowing his brow, “I suggest you speak to a mirror rather than engage a  _ friend _ .” He put his can of beer down on his end table and sighed, the very picture of a Victorian maiden, helpless in sweatpants. “But as I am, thankfully, the latter and not the former, I cannot simply parrot what you want me to say. You like him, Linhardt. And I believe he likes you too.”

“I don’t like him,” Linhardt groaned, leaning down and resting his head upon the cushioned arm of the couch. Comfy. “He’s just cute.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And funny.”

“Mmhmm.”

“And interesting.”

“Tell me more.”

“And…” He blinked, lifting his head just enough to look at Ferdinand. “Wait. What are you doing here?”

Ferdinand burst into bright, cackling laughter.

“Oh, Linhardt,” he said, standing up. “You are  _ such _ a lightweight.”

“Mmnot,” Linhardt said, but Ferdinand was gone; the couch throw had, somehow, been placed on top of him, however, and between that and the feeling of the throw cushion smooshed against his chest, Linhardt was feeling cozy enough to drift off into sleep.

* * *

In the gap between sleep and wakefulness, Linhardt caught snippets of sound.

A song, hummed between pursed lips.

A metal spoon clanging against the side of a pot.

An  _ oops _ and a  _ ugh _ , something hitting the floor.

A softly muttered  _ my clumsy hands. _

The ring of the landline.

A voice -- Ferdinand’s -- shifting from cheer to solemn seriousness.

A song, hummed between pursed lips.

A metal spoon clanging against the side of a pot.

* * *

Linhardt’s watch, pressed up against his eyelids, declared the time as six thirty.

He felt terrible. Alcohol naps were the worst naps. There was a hierarchy of naps, a very clear, immutable one, and alcohol naps were at the very bottom. One never felt rested after an alcohol nap -- an alcohol  _ sleep, _ sure, maybe, it depends, but an alcohol  _ nap _ just resulted in bad breath and a groggy head.

_ It can’t get any worse than this,  _ Linhardt thought, slowly lifting himself up into a shaky sitting position.

“Linhardt,” Ferdinand said. He hovered over him, a glass of water in one hand and a handkerchief in the other. As Linhardt’s eyes adjusted to the light, he saw that his lips were twisted in a frown. “You are awake.”

“I am indeed,” Linhardt groaned, taking the water (but, decidedly,  _ not  _ the handkerchief -- he may have been a man of little dignity, but what little he did have would not allow him to wipe his grungy face on a piece of silk bearing the name  _ Aegir  _ in delicate, golden thread). He took a sip and swallowed; it was harder than it should have been, his throat dry and sore.  _ Lightweight.  _ He took another sip, and then fixed his eyes up to meet Ferdinand’s face. “Why the grimace? Did I make you miss that telenovela?”

“No!” Ferdinand said, sitting down on the couch beside him. It felt weird. I always felt weird to sit next to Ferdinand. Too close. “No,” he said again, quietly, using his rejected handkerchief to instead dab at his own forehead, “I am both delighted and afraid that is not it.”

Linhardt blinked. He’d never been very good at this sort of thing, but he could tell that Ferdinand’s tone was… more serious than he had expected it to be. That couldn’t be good. “Did… I…” He scoured his brain for any ideas; he knew he hadn’t wet himself, so that couldn’t be it. He frowned. “Did I say something weird in my sleep?”

Ferdinand laughed. The sound was strained. Linhardt didn’t like it. “No,” he said, “nothing like that.”

“Then what?” He was growing irritated; Ferdinand was terribly good at bluntness when it wasn’t necessary, and horrible at it when it would be helpful. “Did somebody die?”

Ferdinand’s eyes went wide. “Oh!” he said, throwing one hand over his mouth in what Linhardt assumed was surprise. “Heavens, no! Nothing like that. No, no…” He sighed, his broad shoulders slumping, and his hands twisting the handkerchief taut. “No,” he said again, “but while you were napping, your father called.”

Oh.

“Oh,” Linhardt said.

_ Would have been better had somebody died instead, _ he thought.

“Yes,” Ferdinand said. “He… would like you to call him back at your earliest convenience.”

“Okay,” Linhardt said. He took another sip of water from the glass Ferdinand had given him; it was ice cold, and still burnt going down his throat. Whatever. It was fine. “I’ll get on that at my earliest convenience, then.”

Ferdinand nodded, pressing his feet onto the ground as if preparing to stand. “Should I… give you some privacy, then?”

Linhardt cocked his head to the side. “Why?” he asked. His voice sounded higher than usual to his ears. He hated it. “Pass me the remote, let’s see what’s on the History Channel.”

“Linhardt…”

“Fine, we can watch Bravo if you insist…”

“ _ Linhardt… _ ”

“I am drawing the  _ line _ at the Property Brothers, though.”

“ _ Linhardt von Hevring. _ ”

Linhardt winced. Ferdinand was looking at him with an expression he could only read as  _ pity,  _ and that made him feel even more frustrated.

“I am sorry,” Ferdinand said, and he sounded sorry, which made it even worse. “But you cannot continue to evade him forever.”

“Sure I can,” Linhardt said. “Wonder how he even got this number…”

“He works for the government, Linhardt. I am sure there is a database or something along those lines.”

Linhardt grunted. “Told you we should have put the landline in your name.”

“But it’s not m…”

He couldn’t let him finish the sentence. Linhardt groaned -- a deep, guttural groan, something a man of his petite stature should not have been able to produce -- and stood up suddenly, throwing his hands in the air (but, thankfully, not throwing the half-finished glass of water in the process). “Fine!” he said. “Fine! I’ll call the damn man. Did he leave a number?”

Ferdinand’s eyes were round and watery. Linhardt hated it -- he didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to see that look, didn’t want to have to think about why he had it, why he was aiming it in his direction. Thankfully, Ferdinand nodded, gesturing weakly toward the kitchen. “I wrote it on the message board,” he said, referring to the cheap dollar store whiteboard they kept on their refrigerator. Its usual purpose was to inform each other of shift changes or toilet paper scarcity. Now it was a harbinger of doom. “I hope you can read my handwriting.”

“I hope I can’t,” Linhardt muttered, before trudging off toward the kitchen, feeling sick for an entirely new reason.

* * *

Later that night, an email came.

> Subject: hi!
> 
> From: CvB [ [ thecaspman@au.edu ](mailto:thecaspman@au.edu) ]
> 
> To: Linhardt von Hevring [ [ linhardtvh@eagletutoring.com ](mailto:linhardtvh@eagletutoring.com) ]
> 
> heyyyy Linhardt its me Caspar youre student!! i was tinking about it and I thnk may be we can meet on twosday at freedom park??? they have taybls so we can work and get sum fresh ayr!! let me know what you thnk!!! - Caspar

To which Linhardt sent a reply:

> Subject: Re: hi!
> 
> From: Linhardt von Hevring [linhardtvh@eagletutoring.com]
> 
> To: CvB [ [ thecaspman@au.edu ](mailto:thecaspman@au.edu) ]
> 
> Sounds great. I’ll meet you by the statue of Saint Cethleann.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Linhardt von Hevring
> 
> _Eagle Tutoring_

* * *

When Tuesday arrived, Linhardt was forced to face the truth: the park was a terrible, terrible place for a lesson.

For starters, it was  _ hot _ . The sun was hanging, mercilessly, in the sky, and it was creating  _ heat,  _ which was (ostensibly) its job, but  _ still _ . It didn’t have to be so aggressive about it. It was also breezy, which was a nice contrast to the heat, except for the fact that it blew the few loose strands of Linhardt’s hair directly into his eyes, and this, for some reason, made his nose feel itchy and raw. There should have been no connection between the two sensations, and yet there it was. Thirdly, it was  _ outdoors,  _ where  _ things _ lived, like bugs and children and soccer moms yapping on their cell phones as they pushed their ugly strollers.

The park  _ sucked _ .

Still, he stood by Saint Cethleann’s side, his bag pulled around toward his front, his arms wrapped around it. The gesture comforted him; he felt so exposed, out there in public, for all eyes to see, for all life to --  _ augh _ \-- potentially interact with, and hence he would take any tiny slivers of security he could get.

He was there a little early, like always, and he hated himself for it. It was one thing to be early to a coffee shop, where he could at least pick a seat and buy a drink and  _ sit down,  _ his hips resting in the gentle embrace of a flimsy wooden chair. Coffee shops offered some creature comforts: hot chocolate, air conditioning, the greatest hits of Enya. The outdoors, however, offered nothing but discomfort. And sweat. He was starting to sweat. Just lovely.

It wasn’t like it mattered. Let him sweat. Let him get gross, and stinky, and let his finishing powder fail, and his highlighter melt from its anointed place atop his cheekbones. Let the armpits of his shirt grow wet and stale. It didn’t matter. Who even cared?

(Why did he care?)

He stood, growing increasingly aware of his discomfort. His feet hurt. The arches of his shoes were too high, and the toebox was too narrow. Did he have fat toes? Maybe he had fat toes. The small of his back (small, unlike his toes, which were huge and fat and bulbous) became sore, exhausted of having to carry the weight of the rest of his ludicrous body. One shoulder hurt, but not the one his bag was hanging off of, which didn’t even make sense. His nose was  _ still  _ itchy and raw. He swallowed, and he could have sworn that one of his ears popped; he hadn’t realized it had even been closed up, and perhaps it hadn’t, but it still popped nonetheless.

“Aha,” came a familiar voice from behind him, “so  _ this _ is Saint Cethleann.”

He spun around. Unlike him, Caspar seemed completely in his element; the sun seemed to adore his face, kissing his cheeks and casting him in some unfairly golden hue. He was smiling, and the smile reached his eyes, which were -- oh,  _ fuck  _ \-- the same color as the sky, and Linhardt had known that, of course, but he had known that in the same way he knew space was cold and empty. He’d known it through abstract metaphor and dispassionate study. To be suddenly forced to observe the color of Caspar’s eyes and its easiest comparison in a natural context was absolutely cruel; he had not been ready. He had not prepared.

Also -- also! -- Caspar was not wearing his usual schoolboy getup, the button-up shirts and collars that suggested things without overtly stating them. No, he -- and he was, for the record, the  _ worst  _ person Linhardt had  _ ever  _ had the displeasure of meeting -- was wearing a tight grey tank top and a pair of basketball shorts. At least, he thought he was wearing a pair of basketball shorts. He couldn’t tell. It was hard to take his eyes off of his arms.

“Caspar,” he said, from somewhere deep inside himself, somewhere that was seemingly blind and unaffected by the sight of those  _ biceps,  _ toned to just the right amount, strong,  _ large,  _ without being overly  _ bulky _ , the kind of biceps that would be perfect to be embraced by, warm and inviting and, fuck, he was still, somehow, talking. “Please don’t tell me you cannot tell the Saints apart.”

“Uh,” Caspar said. Linhardt somehow managed to tear his thoughts away from  _ those arms  _ and looked at his face; he wore an unmistakably sheepish expression, and the tips of his ears were pink. Fucking  _ hell _ . “I mean,” he continued, bouncing on the balls of his feet, “I know there are four of them, right?”

“Five, technically,” Linhardt said, smiling, “although we rarely count Seiros with the others. I’m not sure why. They were all related, after all.”

“Can you imagine being, like, a god’s brother?” Caspar said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t wanna be counted with them either.” A sheepish grin crossed his face. “My brother might  _ think _ he’s a god, but…”

Linhardt smirked. Yes, yes, this was better. Talking seemed to keep his mind where it was supposed to be -- on teaching, on education, on imparting information -- and away from the distracting thoughts of  _ oh fuck his shirt is so tight on his chest _ . And if anything was a surefire cure for impure thoughts, it was talking about religion.

“I take it you weren’t raised in a religious household.”

The pink spread from Caspar’s ears to his cheeks. “Uh, no,” he said, with the guilty air of one who made the conscious choice to be born into a heretic family. “That’s not a dealbreaker, is it?”

Linhardt startled. “W-what?”

The pink in Caspar’s cheeks deepened. “I mean,” he said, quickly, “for, like, our lessons and stuff.”

Oh. “Um,” Linhardt said, trying to hear his thoughts over the sudden (and entirely  _ unnecessary _ ) drumming of his heart, “if you’re asking whether or not Eagle Tutoring is a religious institution, let me assure you that… we are very much not.” He reached a hand over to rest on the base of the statue and smiled, shifting some of his weight onto it. Let Saint Cethleann carry both his emotional  _ and  _ physical burden. “I only know so much because my family can supposedly trace its lineage back to the Saints.”

Caspar’s eyes grew wide. It seemed it was  _ his  _ turn to startle. Good. It was only fair. “Wait,” he said, “what?” He laughed, the sound a bit high. “Oh no, Linhardt... are  _ you _ a god’s brother..?”

Linhardt burst out laughing.

“What?!” he said, placing his free hand on his stomach as he laughed, the other one gripping Cethleann’s base tight. “No… what?! No… no…” He didn’t know why it struck him as so funny -- it wasn’t even that funny, Caspar’s dumb, stupid, innocent comment -- but it was so absurd that even remembering it made him laugh even harder, his mirth renewed, and before he knew it he felt his eyes begin to tear. He gave a silent thought of gratitude to the Saints for not having him put mascara on that day.

Caspar, for his part, was frozen in place, watching Linhardt with a small, nervous smile.

“Sorry,” Linhardt said, straightening up, trying to catch his breath through the edges of his laughter. “I, just… oh, Caspar, that was so funny, you don’t even know.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his arm, his laughter fading, finally, into soft, manageable chuckles. “Saints above, I’m sorry…”

Caspar shook his head. “No way,” he said, the smile on his lips shifting from nervous to warm. “I love it when you laugh.”

Okay. That  _ was  _ a weird thing to say. Wasn’t it?! It was, right?! It was such a weird thing to say that Linhardt couldn’t help himself. “Why?” he asked, while part of him -- the part of him that remembered why he was actually there -- screamed in protest toward the back of his big, smart, but  _ so fucking stupid  _ brain.

Caspar didn’t seem to mind. His smile changed into a quiet grin. “You just seem so serious,” he said, “so… bookish? Mature? Like, we’re the same age, but you’re on an entirely different level than I am. It’s just… I don’t know.” He scratched his arm; even away from the harsh fluorescent lights of the coffee house, Linhardt could see the dry skin flake off beneath his fingernails. “I guess it just feels good. To make you laugh, like that.”

Ferdinand’s voice rang in Linhardt’s head.

_ You like him, Linhardt. And I believe he likes you too. _

Stupid. So, so stupid. Luckily. years of living with Ferdinand had made Linhardt an expert at deflection.

“So what I hear you saying,” Linhardt said, “is that I’m an uptight nerd.” He smiled and made a show of straightening his shirt collar. “Not far from the truth. Actually, right on the money. Speaking of which…” He nudged his head in the direction of the pavilion. “There are tables over there. Let’s not waste another cent of your father’s gold.”

Whether or not that was the right thing to say, Linhardt couldn’t be sure; he noticed a slight slump in Caspar’s shoulders, and the corners of his lips fell, almost imperceptibly. He was still smiling, but not as brightly as before. His father would have been proud of him for having been able to tell the difference. But then Caspar laughed and nodded, reaching a hand out. “Let me carry your bag for you, at least,” he said. “I did keep you waiting out here, after all.”

The entire situation was ridiculous. Absurd. He would never have let Bernadetta carry his bag for him, Hell, even some of his other male students -- Raphael leapt to mind -- would have never offered, and, had they, he would have never felt comfortable accepting. Yet, there he was, Linhardt von Hevring, prized tutor for Eagle Tutoring, supposed descendant of Saint Cethleann, pulling his bag off of his shoulder and handing it over to his student, because somehow, there in the bright daze of the sun, it just felt like the right thing to do.

* * *

Just as Linhardt feared, teaching outside was a nightmare.

There were ants. There were so many ants, and they crawled all over the table, dancing over the pages of their lesson notebook, seemingly blind to the scratch of the pen across the paper. They were black ants, at least, so Linhardt wasn’t worried about being bitten, but he still swore they were climbing up his legs beneath his pants, and he couldn’t shake the feeling away.

Caspar was just as focused and eager as usual, but it was so difficult to discuss obscure suffixes when children kicking soccer balls kept flying by the pavilion. It was even harder to get into his planned reading activity -- which involved tracking the uses of pronouns across multiple sentences -- when Jessica and her sixteen children decided to take the tables next to theirs, shrieking about whatever it was children and undersexed mothers shrieked about while fussing over opening Go-gurts and punching holes in Capri Suns.

In the end, they both could only laugh as a final attempt at continuing their lesson as planned was destroyed by the wind blowing away the pile of index cards they had carelessly left on the side of the table, resulting in both of them scrambling to pick them up before they disappeared into the great unknown.

“Okay,” Caspar said, sitting back down, his hands full of index cards freshly stained with dirt, “this wasn’t my best idea.”

“No,” Linhardt said, laughing. “probably not.” He frowned. “I can issue you an extra lesson at the end of your contract to make up for it, if you’d like.”

Caspar narrowed his eyes. “Why?” he asked. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It was my idea to come here.”

“Well, technically,” Linhardt said, “it was my idea to change the location in the first place. And I should have predicted some of these problems and… ack!” He ducked suddenly as a giant wasp flew overhead. Okay. Maybe it wasn’t a giant wasp. Maybe it was a fly. There was no way for the human eye to tell. “Okay, yeah,” he said, slumping against the table, resting his head on his arms. “This was a bad idea.”

Caspar looked down at him for a moment. “Linhardt,” he said, “the ants.”

“Holy Mother of Seiros,” he cursed, sitting up suddenly and wiping the invisible insects off his arms. “I  _ hate _ outside.”

Caspar laughed. Then a look of contemplation crossed his face, and his eyes slowly widened. “Wait a second. Linhardt.”

Linhardt was running his fingers through his fringe desperately, trying to find and destroy any renegade ants that may have climbed up his hair shafts. “Yes?”

Caspar swallowed. “If you’re related to the Saints, and the Saints are related to the Goddess, does that mean…”

“Ah.” Satisfied that his hair was bug free, and suddenly far more interested in this turn of conversation than the hunt for potential insects, he straightened up. “Well, some people think so.”  _ My father, for starters.  _ “I’m of the belief that, if there really is just one, singular Goddess, the Saints were Her disciples and not Her children.” He shook his head. “Actually, I don’t believe in any of it at all, to be honest, and I don’t actually think the evidence linking my family’s bloodline to Cethleann is at all credible.” He chuckled. “I mean, come now. Cethleann? Irish name. And as we established last time…”

“You’re Germanic as hell, yeah,” Caspar said, chuckling. "We established that."

“Yeah,” Linhardt said. He felt himself smile. He didn’t know why. “Actually, now I have a question for you.”

“It’s okay,” Caspar said, “we can head back to the coffee shop next time…”

“Well, good,” Linhardt said, “but that wasn’t my question.”

“Oh.” Caspar blinked, and if Linhardt wasn’t mistaken, he thought he looked almost… anxious. It was nonsense, of course -- the only person in the entire world that felt anxious around Linhardt was Bernadetta, and she would feel anxious around the world’s most soft and gentle kitten -- but still, he couldn’t shake the feeling. Odd. “What’s up?”

Linhardt cocked his head to the side. “Does your father know we’re here?”

Caspar visibly relaxed -- which was  _ weird _ \-- and nodded. “Yeah, I told him I was meeting you at the park.”

“He was okay with that?” Somehow, Linhardt found it hard to imagine big, bossy Ernest von Bergliez feeling all right about a change like this, the devolution of his highly structured, predictable plan into.. whatever this was that it had become. But to his surprise, Caspar nodded again.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “I showed him what you’d taught me and he said he was impressed. I guess he trusts you now.”

(Linhardt suddenly felt a pang of guilt, remembering his brain’s long, highly inappropriate -- he  _ told _ you so,  _ Ferdinand  _ \-- internal monologue about Caspar’s arms. Trust?  _ Him _ ?)

He swallowed and tried his best to smile. “I see.”

Caspar stopped what he was doing -- doodling random geometric shapes into the margins of their half-assed work -- and looked at him. “Hey,” he said, cocking his head to the side, so much like some sort of innocent, unforgivably adorable puppy, “you okay?”

_ I’m not okay,  _ Linhardt thought, in the way that thoughts are so often thought, in flashes of energy and emotion that are parsed far more quickly than the words later construed by the mind to summarize them. He quickly checked his posture and body language; no, nothing about them should have given him away. He was smiling, after all. Relieved by this small miracle, the miracle of his body actually cooperating with his social needs for once, he mirrored Caspar’s gesture, letting his head drift to the side as well. “Hmm?” he said, trying to arch one inquisitive eyebrow (and almost certainly lifting them both). “I’m fine.”

It was odd how the rules of space and time did not seem to apply when Caspar was around. The digits on the face of his watch hardly changed; mere seconds went by, less than a minute, a handful of heartbeats. Not enough time to do anything, really. But in his mind, Linhardt was suddenly much smaller, standing in the ornate living room of his childhood home, his hands stuck stubbornly in his pockets, his lips curled downward into a scowl. His mother was there, perched in her chaise, sobbing quietly into her forearm. His father stood before him, and while he couldn’t make out the words, he could still feel the volume, the way the sound waves seemed to make every tiny hair on his arms stand up, and he knew he had done something wrong. A second passed, half a breath, and the memory became clearer; he was in trouble, yes, and it was his fault. He hadn’t meant to seem so rude. He didn’t understand why it was rude to tell someone the truth. Wasn’t it wrong to lie, Father? His mother’s sobs grew in volume.

_ Child,  _ his father’s voice boomed through his skull,  _ I’m going to teach you tact, so help me Sothis. _

All this flashed through his brain in the time it took for Caspar to inhale and exhale once, his eyes (so blue, like the sky, like the shell of a particularly vibrant robin’s egg) looking over Linhardt’s face before nodding, a hint of heat rising into his cheeks.

“Okay,” he said. “Just wanted to make sure. You looked a little out of it for a moment.” His teeth worried his bottom lip; Linhardt tried very hard not to notice. “Wait… are you hot? Shit, I hadn’t even thought about it… you’re wearing long sleeves…”

“I always wear long sleeves,” Linhardt replied, the words automatic. It was the truth, and the truth was easy to say. He shook his head. “No, don’t worry about me. I’m probably just dehydrated.”

Caspar’s eyes widened. “Oh!” he said, suddenly pulling his bookbag onto his lap and opening it up. “Fuck, I didn’t bring anything else… do you want some of my water?” He looked up at him, a bottle of  _ Poland Spring  _ in his hand. “I swear I don’t have germs.”

Now, Linhardt’s mind may not have been working at full capacity -- the ants, the heat, the blue of Caspar’s eyes and the shadows cast over the hills and valleys of his arms by the unforgiving sun were all to blame -- but he at least had the presence of mind to shake his head, waving a hand dismissively in front of his face. “I’m sure you don’t,” he said, fighting off any of the follow-up thoughts threatening to break through his mind, “but I’m okay, really. I have my own water.” To ease Caspar’s worry ( _ look, Father, I  _ **_do_ ** _ have some capacity for empathy _ ) he pulled his own bag onto his lap, dusting off the invisible ants he assumed were crawling over the fabric and opening it up.

His water bottle was tucked neatly inside an internal pocket, unopened. Next to it, however, was…

“Oh, fuck,” he cursed, looking up at Caspar. “The notebook. I’m sorry, I meant to respond…”

Caspar’s face took on an expression that Linhardt found impossible to immediately parse. His lips were tilted into a soft smile, but there was something about it that felt very off. He hadn’t known Caspar for very long, but he  _ knew _ how he smiled, and he knew that this smile was not a typical one. It didn’t reach his eyes, for starters. And his eyes…

“It’s okay,” Caspar said, laughing. “I know you’re busy…”

...his eyes seemed so sad.

“No,” Linhardt said, shaking his head. “It’s not that. I wanted to respond, I  _ meant  _ to respond, I just….”

Caspar chuckled. “The ADHD?”

Linhardt waved his hand in front of his face. “No, I wish I could blame it on that. No. I…” Linhardt would later not know what got into him at that moment. Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps it was the look of  _ disappointment _ , of  _ resignation,  _ of  _ dejected acceptance  _ on Caspar’s face. Perhaps it was Ferdinand, miniature in scale, sitting on his shoulder and nudging his neck suggestively with his pointy elbow.

Perhaps it was just his heart.

“...do you want to go on a walk?” he asked, leaping up onto his feet. He swallowed; his ear popped again. “I can explain.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @spinningrobo on Twitter, spitefulcleric#1592 on Discord

**Author's Note:**

> Bet you were all aching for literacy theory Casphardt fic! Anyway, Caspar may be dyslexic but he's smart as hell and I will fight for him. I will fight a BEAR for him.


End file.
